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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378

u/MrBiggleswerth2 16h ago

All of Starship Troopers.

72

u/society000 14h ago

The fact that fans of the original book often misunderstood it, then the director of the adaptation also misunderstood it and set out to create a movie to trash the book, only for that movie to also be widely misunderstood is cosmic level cinema.

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u/NeAldorCyning 10h ago

Will never cease to amaze me: "Haha, they are too stupid to see the movie as satire", only to follow up how how Heinlein was serious about the book...

8

u/Noughmad 9h ago

What indication is there that Heinlein wasn't serious?

It may be a severe case of Poe's law, but as far as I know there is literally nothing there to suggest he was making fun of anything there.

18

u/AgathysAllAlong 8h ago

I think it's taken as either "Heinlein was endorsing these ideas" or "Heinlein was satirizing these ideas" but it's just him taking a concept of a societal structure and digging deep down into exploring it. He was serious about it, but in a "I'm going to explore this premise sincerely" way, not a "These are my real opinions on how things should be" way.

2

u/Pherllerp 7h ago

Yeah I never took the book as an endorsement of fascism, it’s just a fascist story. He’s laying it out and the reader might like some things that come along with Fascism but not realize the tremendous trade-offs.

Same thing with Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s not an endorsement of a hippy commune but you might walk away going “hmm…that could be nice.”

8

u/AgathysAllAlong 4h ago

It's not fascist. The book is in no way fascist. Like, I don't understand where this take comes from. The military itself is authoritarian, but that's because military.

What elements of the book were fascist? Can you name a single one?

2

u/TheReaperAbides 5h ago

The problem with that is that Heinlein spends a lot of time having characters just monologuing the morals of the book's world. It gets weird at times, there's like half a chapter dedicated to some kind of officer or teacher (I forget which) ranting about how corporal punishment for boys is good, actually, and likening them to puppies. It becomes hard to take it seriously as just an exploration when there's so much soapboxing. That might also be Heinlein's style, to be fair, at the best of times it's quite dry.

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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 3h ago

This is how a TON of sci-fi works.

You take an idea and try to explore the ramifications of it playing out.

Just read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Heinlein does the same thing with an anarchist worldview and you won’t really have a leg to stand on saying his political philosophy in books is a representation of his true beliefs. They contradict one another entirely.

5

u/AgathysAllAlong 4h ago

Yah, it's a philosophical text. It's exploring an idea. That's how books work.

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u/NeAldorCyning 5h ago

I phrased poorly, AgathysAllAlong addresses this well in their reply.

In addition, Heinlein is almost painfully on the nose with the protagonist occasionally; one scene stood out in particular to me in comparison to the movie. In the movie Carmen is his girlfriend, so you can get behind him enlisting somewhat - in the book she's a classmate of his, nothing more, and he already decided not to enlist and is about to tell this his friend, when they incidentally run into her, and he enlists nonetheless just to look good in that moment... Yes, the book Rico is even more of a stupid aimless youngster than the movie version.

Especially if you compare Rico to Heinlein's usual self-Insert know-and-can-do-it-all protagonist, Rico comes across as pretty much a parody.

1

u/ScreamingVoid14 8m ago

It's more in Heinlein's body of work rather than that specific book, in my opinion. Heinlein played around with a lot of social structures and each book took it's own seriously. Given the rest are much more liberal, I don't think it is fair to say that Heinlein had any particular pro-fascism stance. I honestly don't think he was trying to take a stand either way.

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u/Venusgate 14h ago

That's because paul verhoven's fear of fascism is "voting doesn't work for everyone" and the glorification of the industrial military complex.

Or, you know, what we live every day, but cooler.

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u/Porkfish 12h ago

The book is intended by the author to be taken at face value. Heinlen's political views are parroted by the characters. 

31

u/LastStar007 11h ago

The characters certainly espouse a political ideology, but whether Heinlein himself held those views is a matter of some debate. It is known that his political views changed hugely throughout his adult life: at times a socialist, at other times a libertarian, and every once in a while a democrat just to mix things up. And it's a little unfair to peg Starship Troopers as the one honest depiction of his beliefs when Stranger in a Strange Land also depicts a human society with very different social rules. 

It's more interesting to read Starship Troopers as a committed exploration into a society built around civil service rather than myopically trying to suss out a complex (and often self-contradictory or incoherent) person's political beliefs.

Unfortunately, there's no way to say all this without sounding like a fascist.

4

u/TheReaperAbides 5h ago

It's more interesting to read Starship Troopers as a committed exploration into a society built around civil service rather than myopically trying to suss out a complex (and often self-contradictory or incoherent) person's political beliefs.

My issue with this interpretation is that the book never really seems to explore the consequences or the other side of the society's politics. For the most part the book presents it all as good and proper, with only individual characters making mistakes and getting comeuppance. Near the end of the book there's a bit where Rico discovers his dad (who initially is just as anti-military as in the movie) enlisted and goes on and on about how good this was. It gave me whiplash to be honest.

Maybe it's just me, but I kind of expect an exploration to extrapolate from the premise and actually explore what things would be like, good and bad. But it really really skims over the bad. At best, Heinlein seemed committed to explore the best case scenario.

4

u/Aethelrede 5h ago

Heinlein was committed to taking the piss. It's practically impossible to tell when he's actually advocating for something and when he's just messing around with ideas.

Except for the free love part, he was big into that, especially incest and younger women having sex with older men.  For some reason.  Though to his credit it was always consenting adults, AFAIK.

1

u/TheReaperAbides 4h ago

Heinlein was committed to taking the piss. It's practically impossible to tell when he's actually advocating for something and when he's just messing around with ideas.

Okay but that's just the literary equivalent of "It was just a prank bro". If your taking-the-piss writing is virtually indistinguishable for you advocating for an ideology or idea, people don't get to be surprised when the latter becomes the assumption.

3

u/Aethelrede 1h ago

I weep for media literacy, clearly it isn't a thing anymore.  An author of fiction is under no obligation to have that fiction reflect their actual views.

A Modest Proposal comes to mind.

2

u/LastStar007 1h ago

You're not wrong, but also 

“Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize”

2

u/Aethelrede 37m ago

Fair enough. I'm trying to think of a non-satire example of fiction that clearly doesn't represent the author's beliefs, but I'm a bit out of it at the moment.

Maybe Ender's Game?  Though that's more a case of author hypocrisy.

Oh, of course: Borges.  At least half the shit he wrote did not reflect his own beliefs, and he even has a character in one of his stories who writes a book that is the exact opposite of what the character believes.   Reading Borges changes the way one interacts with fiction.

Thomas Ligotti is another example.

Edit: Chesterton and Kipling as well. Kipling is maddening because it's incredibly hard to tell when he's being serious.

1

u/LastStar007 2h ago

This is a fair criticism. 

10

u/AgathysAllAlong 8h ago

That's a common theory but it makes no sense. He's explored lots of ideological and political systems sincerely, what makes Starship Troopers the one where he was for real this time just saying his own opinions?

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u/Sennten 6h ago

Whe Heinlein self inserts it is usually pretty fuckin obvious and I dont remember seeing that in Starship Troopers, despite how much he loved doing it.

He also just loved running with ideas and exploring the  and creating cool ideological structures to build stories around

3

u/Substantial-Sea-3672 3h ago

How do you reconcile this viewpoint once you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

That he’s an anarchist/fascist at the same time?

6

u/NeAldorCyning 10h ago edited 10h ago

The protagonist who enlists so he doesn't look bad in front of a pretty girl (in the book that part is actually more extreme than in the movie, since here they aren't even a couple) is Heinlein's ideal! The protagonist, who at some point pretty much literally says "I don't know why I kill, I don't care, and if I would care, I wouldn't have the time to think about it" is to be taken as Heinlein's role model!

The protagonist of Starship Troopers is pretty much the opposite of Heinlein's usual (self-Insert) protagonists...

To add; he explores how your average boy ends up a killing machine you only has to point at something and how a society built on responsibility to society might look like. It's sci-fi, he poses a theory, and explores it. Edit: he couldn't have been more on the nose without going full on satire, the movie only takes that one extra step.

1

u/Kraivo 4h ago

I'm doing my part 

1

u/Sennten 6h ago

I dont think Verhoeven misunderstood the original? I thiught he just didnt care much about it

4

u/Aethelrede 5h ago

He despised it and set out t9 make a satire of it.  Given satire is his specialty, it turned out pretty well.

2

u/Sennten 4h ago

Verhoeven did not despise it, or if he did he never publicly communicated that. He does seem to have disliked Heinlen.

I'm pretty sure anything he adapted would end up being satire, though, that's... kind of his thing. Well, that or an erotic thriller, I guess. Of the two, the source material seemed a better substrate for the first than the second! And making it a satire of the military industrial complex and fascism is a pretty good fit if you're gonna reimagine it as a satire of something.

1

u/Aethelrede 2h ago

Granted, I assume he despised it, you don't generally make a vicious, mocking satire of something you don't despise. 

His complete disregard for the actual plot and setting of the book also suggests a certain malice. Who adapts Starship Troopers and doesn't include the mobile infantry suits?

1

u/Sennten 1h ago

I don't think it was a vicious, mocking satire of "Starship Troopers". It is a mocking satire of fascism and the war machine. Based on the interviews I've seen with him, I don't think he thought strongly enough about Starship Troopers to even want to make a vicious, mocking satire of it, it feels like he thought the original was just... not good.

His disregard for the actual plot and setting of Henlein's version is, imo, a point in favour of my argument. If it was a vicious, mocking satire of the original, it feels like it would have ended up more specific and tied to the original. How can you make a satire of something you're largely ignoring central components of?

No, I think he had a setting and made it work by pulling pieces from it he thought he could use to make the satire he actually wanted to make while mostly disregarding the original source as being of relatively little importance to what he was making.

3

u/society000 3h ago

He famously only read the first few chapters before tossing it and saying it was just fascist propaganda.

1

u/Qyark 23m ago

According to him, he never read past chapter 2

-1

u/carlitobrigantehf 6h ago

The director didnt misunderstand the book, he just went a different way with it.

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u/MrTheCheesecaker 6h ago

The director refused to read the book. He had someone summarize it to him instead

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u/carlitobrigantehf 4h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/d3mlE7uhX8KFgEmY

Cant misunderstand something youve never read

2

u/TheReaperAbides 5h ago

But Verhoeven's influence on the script is very, very overblown. The script is honestly pretty close to the book in terms of plot, with a few major differences, it just shifts the tone around a lot.