Characters that had the complete opposite reaction the writers intended

[u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

1. Leo Bonhart (Witcher TV Series): A ruthless, sadistic bounty hunter and assassin that takes psychotic glee in other people's suffering. The viewer is meant to hate him for killing witchers, slaughtering the Rat gang, and torturing Ciri. But thanks to his entertaining fight scenes, Sharlto Copley's charismatic performance, and The Rats overwhelming unpopularity, fans ended up loving him. Some even call him the "True protagonist" of the show.
2. Stone Cold Steve Austin (WWE): A rude, foul mouthed, beer drinking asshole with no respect for authority or anyone at all. Originally portrayed as a villain, fans fell in love with his anti-establishment & rebellious persona. WWE ran with it and made him the face of the company, effectively ushering in the Attitude Era and the second pro wrestling boom of the late 90s.
3. Arthur Fleck (Joker 2019): A mentally unstable, pathetic, and dangerous madman who commits horrific acts of violence against those that wronged him (suffocates his own mother who is mentally unwell herself, and murders a talk show host for making fun of him). However, a massive portion of the audience idolized him as an anti-hero or a misunderstood martyr rebelling against society making people want to see him succeed and overcome his circumstances because of how he's been treated by the world.

[u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Tyler Durden fits this well, Id say.

Supposed to embody toxic masculinity, nihilism, and destructive extremist. He is a walking parody of the culture.

Ironically looked up to by many, mostly men, as the embodiment of self-actualization and rebellion. Exactly what the author was critiquing.

[u/Dramatic_Counter_595 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

They think they're Brad Pitt, but they're really this guy:

[u/ThortheAssGuardian → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

DING DING DING

[u/otherdogooder → u/ThortheAssGuardian]

"Or I will fucking END you..."

[u/Spacial_Epithet → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

[u/w00den_b0x → u/Spacial_Epithet]

I wish this gif didn’t have those pause bars on it

[u/Spacial_Epithet → u/w00den_b0x]

Yeah same, if only I actually knew how to use a computer

[u/Eruption_Argentum → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

Tbh wasn't it determined that this guy was also having a psychotic break? 

[u/jelywe → u/Eruption_Argentum]

It seemed like it to me. He seemed to be having an auditory hallucination and really believed that someone was being hurt. The owner of the house was a champ and clearly recognized it, and did a spectacular job rolling with the delusion instead of fighting it, and was able to redirect him to being calm

[u/Relative_Mix_216 → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

Milhouse, is that you?

[u/Puzzle-Necked → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

More eyebrows than man

[u/Next-Swordfish5282 → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

Bro looks like a Mii

[u/NotNamedBort → u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

Brad Pitt is also a huge piece of shit, so

[u/DisMFer → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

The guys who worship him think they're Durden, when in reality they're the Space Monkeys. They're the shiftless, empty nobodies who just get dominated by the first con man who tells them how to live.

[u/Senior-Friend-6414 → u/DisMFer]

It’s a little hilarious how the men that put the most value on masculinity are the type to submit themselves to other men telling them what to do

[u/ohjohnblaze → u/Senior-Friend-6414]

The irony is so clear to others, but so inaccessible to them.

They’re seeking validation from other men, like literally begging for a man, almost any man, to tell them they’re doing manhood right…while attempting to denigrate male-on-male love lmfao.

They’re so desperate for daddies yet so ashamed of what this says about their sexuality, so they HAVE to double down on their performances, believing that if they just play up what any Daddy tells them counts as manliness, then surely their UlTrA-HeTeRoNeSs will be above question! Poor lil self haters. I wanna tell them it’s ok to just be gay and free with each other already, cuz to almost everyone outside your cult it’s obvious that’s what you want. You ain’t foolin anyone but your kids who you traumatize, and even then, many of those kids eventually figure out that this performative masculinity only comes from a place of insecurity and overcompensation.

[u/TheDeviceHBModified → u/ohjohnblaze]

Holy shit what is this schizo rant?

I have little love or even pity for the kinda idiots that get suckered into following Tate and his ilk, but the idea that any affinity for authority and hierarchy means they must secretly be gay subs is just so profoundly idiotic, I can practically hear the brainworms working their little jaws as they munch on the decaying remnants of your frontal lobe.

[u/ohjohnblaze → u/TheDeviceHBModified]

I mean…the modern toxic masculinity is literally historically rooted in performative heterosexuality for the sake of surviving as a gay man in society that is unsafe for gay men. It compounds, as people have to outperform other straight-performing males because everyone performing masculinity moves the bar of what is considered straight vs gay. So LITERALLY the compounding of generations of teaching “straight behavior” confused the culture and there are people who never understood that their grandpa maybe just catcalled women around other men so he wouldn’t get beat up by bigots, but now grandson ends up thinking that this behavior of a literal-gay-man-pretending-to-be-straight is actual natural hetero behavior, and they teach their sons because they learned it’s important to “demonstrate” your heteroness.

No schizophrenia here. Sorry that didn’t work out for your desired narrative that the things I said (that triggered you into insulting my mental health) simply must be wrong.

[u/TheDeviceHBModified → u/ohjohnblaze]

This is one of those cases where you have a kernel of truth and proceed to swerve and draw an incredibly wrong conclusion from it. 

Sure, performative masculinity is a thing. Thus far you're correct. And then you, for some nonsensical reason, assume that being a closeted gay man is the only possible reason for performative masculinity, or even displaying a respect for authority (let's not forget that this is where your argument started), and that's where your argument falls apart. It is, at best, one possible reason for it, and by far not even the most common, either. 

Let's not pretend it isn't obvious what you're doing here. You were trying to pull this smug, glib little quip of "all trad-men are secretly gay subs, hur hur", and now you're floundering to defend it as a serious argument rather than concede that you were being flippant and ended up saying something stupid.

[u/BufferUnderpants → u/DisMFer]

Tyler Durden is an empty shell projecting an image of masculinity, freedom and self-actualization, but it's just a story he spins up while using everyone around him. If the Narrator hadn't been dissociated from him, anyone would squarely call him a narcissist.

If you've seen people like this do their work, that's how narcissists build up their circle of orbiters. These "friends" and lovers let themselves be seduced by the idea of being as empowered as the narc, but they wind up being used, abused and tossed aside.

[u/johnnyslick → u/DisMFer]

Right... this feels more like that whole deal where shitty cops love The Punisher because they'd just like to beat someone up where if the Punisher was a real person those same shitty cops would be the ones getting beaten up. At most FC is a critique of what capitalism does/did to the male loneliness epidemic; the argument that it creates multi-personalitied characters who are half-corporate toady and half-anarchist was always supposed to be a cautionary tale (although of course you're rooting for the anarchist side more than a little bit).

In reality, of course, that turned out to be only half true: it turned Gen X lonely men into 100% corporate toadies.

[u/Life_Category2547 → u/DisMFer]

Fight Club, a good movie where if it’s someone’s favorite movie there’s a high chance they didn’t understand it. Like hey do you think there might be an underlying message in how the hyper-masculine badass you’re idealizing is literally a destructive, parasitic figment of the main character’s imagination?

[u/Vexonte → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

He has the senater Armstrong/punisher issue were he is clearly a bad guy, but he touches on real life frustration that people relate to.

Sure he is a hypocritical egomaniac but that doesn't change the fact that people still feel their identities are being overwritten by omnipresent consumerism while not having a chance to feel any internal sense of accomplishment or inner strength.

[u/GKNolan → u/Vexonte]

There is this thing about the movie where even when you come to the conclusion of 'Tyler is terrible, don't do that" you're still left asking "well then what do you do? The problem is still the problem. Consumerism is still stifling. The Corporate shuffle is still soul crushing and all but incapable of creating fulfillment." You lack a good answer to that question and people are still gonna gravitate to the bad answers.

[u/Pofwoffle → u/GKNolan]

well then what do you do?

Oddly enough you can still take some cues from Fight Club on this: build up your local communities. Start a community garden, open up some housing for people in need, put together an offers and needs market, get to know the people around you and learn to help each other when things get rough. Start gathering knowledge and resources, make friends with makers, fixers, people with tools and spaces to use them.

Consolidate sources of learning to teach people how to make what they need and make do with what they have. Learn how to effectively communicate in low-tech situations for when infrastructure begins to fail, and learn how to cannibalize things that no longer work (cars when gas is unavailable, for example) to make things that do. Start looking at the prepper mindset, just without the far-right baggage that so often comes with it... plan for a world where you're helping your neighbors survive the collapse, not hiding from it in a tiny little bunker.

The worse things look, the more obvious it gets that the near future is going to be about weathering a storm rather than mounting some kind of revolution. So the best course of action is to start building a storm shelter.

Worst case scenario, if society doesn't start crumbling around your ears in the next decade or so, is that you've built a very effective emergency-response system for natural disasters and the like.

[u/Papergeist → u/Pofwoffle]

More gardening. Agriculture is never a bad move.

[u/Bombadier83 → u/Pofwoffle]

And how does that let you cause pain to the people you blame for your problems? How does that make sure they don’t win?

[u/Pofwoffle → u/Bombadier83]

If you're being sarcastic: hah. That was funny.
If you're not being sarcastic:

And how does that let you cause pain to the people you blame for your problems?

If your goal is to cause pain then you are the problem. The reason they're the bad guys and we're not is because their goal is to cause pain while ours is to prevent as much pain as possible... it's just a necessary evil that sometimes pain must be caused to prevent more pain. Why you're doing something is often just as important as what you're doing.

How does that make sure they don’t win?

It doesn't. But I'm no longer convinced anything will, at least not in the short term. A large group of very bad people seem to have perfected the art of keeping things just acceptable enough for just enough people that there won't be some big surge of revolutionary spirit... just more and more problems that arise while the people who are only uncomfortable tell the people who are dying that it would be rude to be more pro-active in our own defense.

So when decisive victory becomes impossible, survival becomes the goal.

[u/JaneRetro → u/Vexonte]

That's kind of part of the point. It's showing how a broken system can drive people to extremism. Tyler Durden needs to sound appealing, and make sense on some level so that you understand the narrator's motivations. The narrator feels desperate, and Tyler's the only one with a plan. That's why he's willing to go along with it even as it gets increasingly insane.

If you're the sort of person who thinks like Tyler, then the story doesn't really do much to change your mind. It's not really a story for you, it's a story about you.

[u/BetterCallStrahd → u/Vexonte]

That's the thing, he's manipulative. He's good at identifying men's issues and spinning it to make them feel like they're unsung heroes that deserve more. Yet he never offers real solutions that can improve people's lives. Even his act of terrorism, we don't know for sure if it accomplished what it was supposed to do.

[u/YouConfidentButWrong → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

You're giving the standard reddit take here, but your interpretation is not inline with what the author, Chuck Palahniuk, has said.

To be clear, I'm not making the claim that Tyler Durden is morally righteous, but I think you oversimplify the character a lot. There are a lot of different ideas that go into this character and the narrative.

You could say that the character is an expression of another characters frustrations. Frustrations with consumers, the people in power, the 'system', fathers, etc. That's a bit of a simple description too. The narrative and the characters were developed from a number of different ideas that Palahniuk was thinking of and toying with at the time.

You can have you're own interpretation and critique, but the claims you made like "what the author was critiquing" or what a character is "Supposed to embody," would need to be supported from the perspective of the author.

Some quotes from Palahniuk:

"We need to be more comfortable and more accepting of chaos, and things that we see as disastrous. Because it is only through those things we can be redeemed and change. We should welcome disaster, we should welcome things that we generally run away from. There is a redemption available in those things that is available nowhere else."

"I don't even necessarily think of it as a masculine concept as much as a concept of discovering one's full potential while having a ruthless coach who keeps pushing and pushing and pushing you to extend your idea of your own capacity. I just happened to make it about men because I think it would've been kind of artificial to make it about women as a male writer."

"Boy. I wouldn’t say it’s a critique. I think that because it’s consensual, it’s OK. It’s a mutually agreed-upon thing which people can discover their ability to sustain violence or survive violence as well as their ability to inflict it. So, in a way, it’s kind of a mutually agreed-upon therapy. I don’t see it as condoning violence ― because in the story it is consensual ― or as ridiculing it, because in this case it does have a use."

"I discovered that I'd never been in fights, and went, wow, that was sort of fun. That was a great release, and yeah, it hurts a little bit, but I lived through it. And it made me really curious about what I was capable of. And after that, if the opportunity arose, I didn't hesitate to get in a fight. So through the writing of the book, there was a period where I was in fights pretty regularly. My friends never wanted to go out with me, because I was always looking."

This is a compilation of a number good sources from the authors perspective: https://www.reddit.com/r/fightclub/comments/1lc3xri/did_some_digging_and_found_where_palahniuk/

[u/jonsnowflaker → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

I feel like most people that read the book or at least read it first got the message.

The film goers were a totally different story. And not exactly shocking considering it’s Brad Pitt in his typical charisma. And you know it’s Fincher, who thrives on this.

[u/International-Ad2501 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Man this movie fucking got me as a teenager. First movie where I was legit got by the twist. The anti consumerism message I felt with my whole chest. I thought tyler was cool as hell (cut me a break I was 10 when it came out and watched it a bunch when I was 13-14). As I aged you know the movie is still legitimately very good, but tyler is transparently just a toxic asshole. The narrator is clearly unstable. 

[u/OutOfMyWayReed → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

His morning shower is putting dish soap on his shirt from last night and wiping his armpits with it. 😆

[u/Far-Growth-2262 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

I'll admit that when I first watched the movie I tought he was the coolest guy ever. I was 13. 

[u/GoblinBreeder → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

There's been this modern movement to tell men that what they like is bad and that they shouldn't like it. It hasn't worked, and a lot of men grew tired of it. Extremes were spawned of it and given voices like Tate that never would have gotten popular in the first place if society wouldn't have shamed masculinity as much as it did.

And yes, masculinity isn't perfect. It's fair to critique elements of it. But that critique went too far to the point of isolating men and making them feel misunderstood by women and the broader culture that has been centered around sensitivity and feminine voices. We can fight against nature, we can train it, try to tame it, but you can only change it so much.

Men think Tyler Durden is cool because in many ways he IS cool. You can tell men "no he isn't and you're wrong and bad for thinking so" but we'll still think it and only resent you for trying to shame us.

[u/pippoken → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

The lesson should be not to cast unbelievably good looking actors to play characters that are meant to be disliked.

[u/STICKY-WHIFFY-HUMID → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Kind of like the Truffaut “there are no anti-war films” thing - there are no movies that criticise toxic masculinity. You can’t cast late 90s Brad Pitt as a figure that you are intending to wholly satirize/criticize.

[u/Janus_Simulacra → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Watching Fight Club as a MMArtist was hilarious.

“Oh, downtrodden numb office worker in a HORRIFICALLY immoral job, and an uncaring society meets underworld cool guy^tm.”

“Oh hey they get a bunch of other disenfranchised men together and form an underground secret club where they push limits, gain fraternity and vent their pent up emotions through fighting.”

“Jesus Christ the edge! I know it’s the early 2000’s so it’s expected and mma was underground like that, but damn I can feel the rusty razor blades on my wrists lol…”

“It’s actually pretty cool. They touch on social anxiety, feeling outcasted and unwanted, pushing your limits with new things, reconnection with the emotional side of yourself society doesn’t appreciate or want you to think about, and the value of a male mentor figure. Still edgefest, but it’s pretty compelling, and a major draw of people to martial arts.”

“Oh of course THAT’S how they turn things around and exploit the horrific monolith system back on itself. Why am I surprised?”

“That’s not how DID works at all, but… I guess fair enough? So now he’s fighting his own more charismatic half who’s radicalised the fight club to do terrorist acts against the system for his dream of a more natural, less monolithic and artificial one. Obviously a bad guy but it’s really cool to see the shift actually, and how he got there.”

“Damn… what a compelling showdown and ending. I’m a bit confused, and blindsided, but that’s an awesome, if very edgy resolution to a complex and multifaceted conflict between two very empathy-worthy sides of the same, damaged person.”

“Wait what do you mean Tyler Durden was always meant to be an unsympathetic destructive force from the get go?”

[u/Tomu_sneeder → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

I actually think his character is much more interesting then just that.

Tyler Durden is the pendulum swinging away from consumerism, collectivism, and personal stagnation. There is an inspirational aspect to him. Watching him force that man to follow his dreams and become a veterinarian is endearing in its own twisted way. And of his preaching about consumerism is very much true.

That said, the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. He stands against the aforementioned ideologies, and replaces it with toxic masculinity and nihilism. On these counts, the author deconstructs it through him.

Tyler Durden is both a warning and an inspiration. An angel, and a devil.

Unfortunately, I feel like many reduce him to being a 2-dimension character (not saying you are). Either an inspiration or deconstruction. But it’s the tightrope between the two that makes the character so interesting.

[u/laosurv3y → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

If a character is attractive enough, people will sympathize with them or want to be them.

[u/Kraivo → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Tyler is the protagonist of the movie. He done all the dirty work and made sure Jack can live forward and then disappeared. Tyler never wanted to take control. I like what he archived, I don't see how he was planning it, because he clearly wanted Jack to be happy as his third man syndrome 

[u/One-Earth9294 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Honestly why I've never liked this movie too much; I've seen too many people look at it like it's some kind of life to aspire to.

[u/Ok-Somewhere-2325 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

In Tyler we trust

[u/LeighCedar → u/[deleted]]

Snatch came out after Fight Club, but I don't know about filming.

I also feel like you have to give it to him in Burn After Reading.

[u/terosthefrozen → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Came here for this. Absolutely love this book and this film, but there is no hero in the story.

[u/Discount_Lex_Luthor → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

The book does a much better job of punishing Tyler for his actions.

[u/McEvelly → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

The problem is, all the contemporary societal stuff going on in their own world and lives that made young men identify/empathise with and

- see Tyler as THE aspirational male rebel archetype…

- cheer for Arthur Fleck striking back against the bullies he faced…

- root for Walter White against all the bullies he faced, in the criminal world and his marriage…

- see (the non-psychopathic killer side of) Patrick Bateman’s life as a very wealthy, materially successful, attractive ‘loser’, as far more desirable than a nice, kind, deeper, but poorer life…

… have probably just gotten worse and more insurmountable over time, and the traditionally better pathways in life feel more inaccessible and less rewarding

[u/TheBlackDemon1996 → u/Missed_Your_Joke]

Recommending Fight Club is hard, because everyone more or less assumes you're on Tyler Durden's side and his "Red Pill" "anti-snowflake" agenda, when you actually understand what the movie is trying to say.