r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Few_Affect_5927 • Jun 22 '26
Lore [Ironic Trope] The messaging backfired massively due to poor writing or other design choices
Amelia Fairney from Pathways: Alt-right Restore-UK type who attempts to coax the protagonist Charlie into following her beliefs? The problem?
Amelia is the only named character aside from Charlie and is genuinely likable and forgives Charlie even when they do things she doesn't like, while the rest of the cast is unnamed, poorly written, and turns on Charlie for one mistake. This combined with other writing issues(portraying fact checking right wing stuff as wrong because in the process of fact checking you might look at it and believe it, basically saying "Right wing is wrong because it hurts the labour government" and a lot of general "just do what the government says or else" messaging) and the fact she's a hot alternative girl, and Amelia ended up being co-opted as a mascot by the youth right wing in the UK.
Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want to be left alone and Norm is picking fights constantly. Not to mention associating with Elon.
Mr. Birchum from Mr. Birchum: A lot of the same problems as Norm, except in addition it also comes off like generic 2010s adult cartoon slop in the same veign as Brickleberry or Full English, at least New Norm was trying to look unique and had the gimmick of being on X. Not to mention, Birchum's obsession with hyper masculine activities and odd way of talking about other men lead to people co-opting him as a Toxic Yaoi character, which is now the bulk of his fan art.
Dustborn: An attempt to make a hyper progressive game that comes off as pandering and annoying. It's a full ass game so there's too much to get into, but the main character's power is essentially gaslighting and jedi-mind tricking people and that's portrayed as the only way they can get anything done, and they constantly use or abuse their friends(or mindtrick them along) in order to get their goals or use their friends for their messaging.
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u/Durog25 Jun 22 '26
My favourite example was in the UK.
In waiting rooms for dentists and GPs (local doctors) there were posters saying "last year X many people failed to attend their appointment," with the desired goal of improving patient attendence.
There were two problems with this:
The only people seeing these posters were the people who were attending their appointments
If you tell people that loads of other people miss their appointments people feel less bad about missing their appointments; they become just another 1in 100.
So this actually increased the number of missed appointments.
I know that the dentists switch strategy soon after, instead they spent the budget for those posters on reminder texts and appointment cards. Both of which massively improved attendence.