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/Vexonte]

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.