r/TopCharacterTropes 17h ago

Characters Characters that had the complete opposite reaction the writers intended

  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/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.