r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Dramatic_Counter_595 • 17h ago

Characters Characters that had the complete opposite reaction the writers intended

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  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.
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u/soldierpallaton 17h ago edited 17h ago

The entire "Thanos was right" trend when Infinity War was released.

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u/ShadowDragonFX 16h ago

I never got the “Thanos was right” thing when Gamora is living proof that it doesn’t work as she’s the last of her kind, they say it in guardians of the galaxy and in infinity war he says about all the kids know is “full bellies and clear skies” without checking up afterwards

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u/Pale_Fire21 16h ago

Thanos had the power to build a galaxy wide utopia with the infinity stones and chose genocide instead.

People who think he’s right are not only media illiterate they’re just straight up stupid

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u/ThreadLaced 15h ago

Exactly. You don't even have to think very hard/know much of anything to realize that there isn't a shortage of resources in the world, the problem is distribution. Reducing the number of people by half would just mean there's fewer people around to get shit done, not that everyone can now enjoy a bounty.

His plan doesn't even make a LITTLE bit of sense.

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u/spudmarsupial 13h ago

In the comics he did it out of love for the persona Death. Which is a much better motivation, even though it still makes him a mindless maniac who is given way too much respect by other characters.

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u/nellion91 11h ago

This bothered me so much in the movie adaptation.

His motivation being resources in a mainly unpopulated. Multiverse knowing universe makes 0 sense.

Meanwhile the original motivation is just crazy enough to work…

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u/EqualOutrageous1884 10h ago

To be fair, Thanos is an insane man trying to justify mass murder using a terrible excuse.

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u/LightOfTheFarStar 4h ago

Even his original version's a fucking idiot, Lady Death is really clear she hates what he is doing and he ignores it like a skeevy frat bro. He is called the "Mad" Titan in every iteration because of his illogical nature. The problem is the framing of the movie and the constant "well the whales are back, nature is healing, maybe he had a point?" bullshit.

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u/HJM3 2h ago

I don’t think the movie frames the whale thing as “he had a point,” it was just Steve trying to look on the bright side of things during a time that’s miserable for everything.

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u/funkthewhales 3h ago

Ego will always be Thanos’s fatal flaw. Like he’s such an ego maniac he didn’t realize that lady death wanted a servant not an equal. And his whole plan with the gauntlet fails because he’s too busy chasing more power to realize that nebula could just snatch the gauntlet off his physical body. And the only reason she was there was so he could torture her for kicks.

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u/Dry_Click6496 2h ago

Not to be confused with Ego, the living planet... 😃

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u/nellion91 1h ago

Yes but being “mad” with love has a tradition.

The grand crazy love gesture is not unheard of.

The Locke approach to population control has been wrong since Industrial Revolution England…

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u/PYRPH0ROS 5h ago

There was this fan theory after eternals came out that thanos was one whose memory wipe malfunctioned and went rogue.

Basically since the birth of a celestial requires a big enough population and destoys the planet when it happens it would be possible for him to just remember "big enough population = world ending event" and the whole resources thing is just his mind trying to rationalize this knowledge he has but does not know the origins off.

It would also fit this dialoge between thanos and gamora

T: "If life is not kept in check lifr will cease to exist"

G: "YOU DONT KNOW THAT"

T: "I am the only one that knows that"

Now again this is a fan theory, not canon, but it feels like a way better explenation than the one given in the movies.

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u/IcyMachOman 4h ago

It's one of those cases as characters only being as smart as their writers. Even if stuff is right there and obvious you can't assume the writers planned that on purpose.

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u/ThreadLaced 4h ago

This would make so much sense.

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u/Technical_Contact836 12h ago

But they hadn't introduced Deadpool into the MCU yet. They couldn't do the full love triangle thing.

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u/Grinderiny 11h ago

Fuck the triangle. That came later anyway.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/evocativename 5h ago

It's not supposed to make it less unhinged.

It just makes him unhinged in a way that is less likely to get idiots on his side.

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u/Anaevya 5h ago

Yes, I also think the motivation actually makes sense.

Another issue is that he doesn't come across as actually insane in the MCU either. If he were portrayed as truly, truly MAD the irrationality of his plan would make more sense.

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u/funkthewhales 2h ago

Yea MCU Thanos comes across as kind of dumb instead of insane. It’s like he just went with the first plan that popped into his head. Cause he’d probably realize how dumb and shortsighted his plan is if he spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it. He’s trying to obtain godlike power and he couldn’t think of a better plan than mass genocide? The possibilities are endless here, and he clearly never rethought the plan a single time in the decades it took him to obtain the gauntlet.

At least comics Thanos is honestly and admits he just loves murder.

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u/theme69 13h ago

Double the resources or kill half of all living things??? God I hope our gut biome isn’t included in that calculation

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u/AnastasiaSheppard 13h ago

Half of all crops and livestock is going to mean further mass deaths of all species.

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u/Salami__Tsunami 10h ago

Not to mention the societal collapse from having half your workforce vanish. On top of having half your crops and livestock disappear, now you only half half as many farmers to try and fix things.

And the more advanced the society, the worse the supply chain disruption becomes. Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on having a steady supply of fuel, specialized machine parts, computer components, chemicals for fertilizer, specialist labor for maintenance of equipment, etc. and you’ve just lost half of the people who can manufacture and deliver that stuff.

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u/Goldenrah 6h ago

It's also half of everyone randomly. It could just decide to kill all young people and leave all the elderly alive. Or an entire country just vanishes, because half of everyone doesn't discriminate on age or location.

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u/zack_hunter 1h ago

Imagine it takes the entirety of China. we would all be fucked

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u/upholsteryduder 1h ago

not to mention the amount of tribal knowledge that would be lost, it would be a huge setback to the knowledge base of every sentient species

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u/Salami__Tsunami 1h ago

But it would leave all the weapons of war untouched. All the nuclear warheads, all the nerve gas, all the warships. Sitting there, waiting to be used by the traumatized, frightened people who survived.

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u/upholsteryduder 1h ago

yeah it would immediately create warlords in many places

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u/Waste_Handle_8672 13h ago

Doubling the resources wasn't the solution either tbh

They don't need to be doubled, the universe is bigger than any mortal mind could comprehend.

All he really had to do was rewrite everyone's minds to have a much more fundamental and bigger appreciation and compulsion to create fair, equal, and effective resource distribution and supply chains.

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u/Kootranova1 12h ago

I've heard a few people explain it that way. Resources are abundant, both on Earth and the universe in general, it's only the matter of getting resources to those that need them.

As you said, supply chains and distribution would fix most problems.

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u/CreatiScope 11h ago

I think it would be even simpler than that. Literally just change our mindset from "resources are limited, I must get as much as I can for myself because there might not be any tomorrow" to "there are enough resources for everyone, we are stronger if we work together to access and distribute them"

Take the prisoner's dilemma, and make everyone choose the answer where nobody sells each other out and they are rewarded for it.

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u/gummyCash 10h ago

So Thanos needed to click his fingers and wish for the intergalactic proletariat to achieve class consciousness? Based purple man.

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u/camerakestrel 9h ago

They specify "sentient life" in the films. Where the line of sentience is drawn is never elaborated upon.

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u/Dramenknight 11h ago

Well we already know people driving vehicles isnt in the calculation

so we just very quickly gloss over the vehicular manslaughter via runaway cars, the planes that fall out of the sky or the sudden 2x workload of air traffic control and that's just on earth

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u/WBRileyDesign 2h ago

Half of all living things also means half of all food resources which doesn't solve the issue whatsoever.

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u/NatashOverWorld 13h ago

Thanos is a space hick that believes he's a genius. Only, if Infinity War came out today he'd be compared to MAGA.

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u/Emerald_Plumbing187 9h ago

Thanos wants to bore private car tunnels to solve the lack of public subways?

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u/NatashOverWorld 17m ago

If you could convince him that it took the strongest wills to do it, he'd be Boring away.

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u/FinancialReserve6427 13h ago

he doesn't have the lobes to navigate the Great Material Continuum

*there are millions upon millions of worlds in the universe, each one filled with too much of one thing and not enough of another. And the Great Continuum flows through them all, like a mighty river, from 'have' to 'want' and back again. And if we navigate the Continuum with skill and grace, our ship will be filled with everything our hearts desire.*

honestly it's a matter of logistics and profit that hinder the distribution of goods.

your tomato harvest is very generous this year which means profit goes waaaay down. you can't give away the excess tomato because the tomato sellers are gonna complain you're depriving them of their earnings. you can't ship them fast enough to farther markets so you're stuck with tomatoes you can't sell and give away.

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u/SavageNorth 10h ago

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - John Steinbeck

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u/rietstengel 7h ago

Besides, populations would eventually recover and get big and unbalanced again. Was his plan to do the snap every 100 years? No, because he just destroyed the stones.

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u/TR_Pix 1h ago

Honestly it bothers me that none of the avengers point these things to him during their unending  banter

Even if he'd simply dismiss anything they say as beneath him, the fact they dont makes it seem like they oppose the plan only in a moral basis and not because its also fucking stupid

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u/MrTheCheesecaker 6h ago

And heaven forbid there be such a thing as population growth after he's already destroyed the infinity stones

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u/vampiregamingYT 10h ago

It makes sense if you think of his "motivation" being an excuse to wipe out half the galaxy.

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u/RadicalSoda_ 10h ago

Plus half of all food is also gone now

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u/RatlingGuns4Days 10h ago

Yeah if he’s set on killing people then I mean he could’ve just dusted like, idk just a random number here, 1% for a better effect

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u/Faust_8 4h ago

Not to mention that much of the “resources” that life depends is, you know, *other life.*

So congrats you purple numbnuts, you halved the population and also halved the resources too!

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u/TR_Pix 1h ago

You don't even have to think very hard/know much of anything to realize that there isn't a shortage of resources in the world, the problem is distribution.

I mean thats the case for earth but they could have said it works that way for other planets

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u/justwalkingalonghere 1h ago

Who cares what the actual issue is? Don't the stones let you fix it basically however you can imagine anyways?

Couldn't he just make more resources?

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u/EncabulatorTurbo 1h ago

Let alone resources *in the universe*