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Analysis / Informed Wrongness

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Common Reasons for Informed Wrongness:

  • A character had valid points, but presented them in an arrogant, grumpy, or pessimistic way, and so is treated by the narrative as nothing but a pain in the butt. For a hypothetical example, there could be a show where the main characters are scientists, but they don't follow safety standards. Along comes Alice, and she wants everyone to follow safety standards more often, frequently saying things like "Don't you idiots know...?". While she could have been politer, Alice had a point about safety being important, yet due to her negativity, we're supposed to see her as a Jerkass with nothing valid to say. See The Complainer Is Always Wrong.
  • A character is right this time, but was wrong plenty of other times. Basically, when the allegedly wrong character resembles the proverbial stopped clock— right twice a day. This could work with both intelligence or knowledge (a character is an idiot or woefully uneducated but this time they're holding the Smart Ball) and morality (a character is a villain, but they do have a point about the initial problem). For the first type, Alice may be a dyed-in-the-wool ditz, but when she suggests that Bob is being too rude to Charlie, her claims have merit. For the second type, perhaps Bob wants to get rid of shoplifters by killing them. While it's definitely wrong to kill shoplifters, the narrative paints any kind of solution for dealing with shoplifters as wrong, just because Bob's one was too extreme.
  • We're never shown why the thing being promoted as bad is indeed bad: For instance, a Drugs Are Bad story in which no downsides to taking drugs are shown onscreen. This may overlap with Clueless Aesop, since it's common in kids' stories where the authors think showing the negative consequences of something would be too scary for kids.
  • A character is portrayed as immoral, when they behaved out of ignorance: This is seen commonly in stories involving Living Toys. Characters who "mistreat" their own toys are seen as heartless jerks, but they didn't know the toys were sentient and thus it's likened to animal cruelty, when the person believed it was more akin to playing rough with an inanimate object.
  • Characters are played as immoral for disbelieving in the supernatural: This can overlap with the "ignorance" one if their disbelief in the supernatural results in them harming or inconveniencing a supernatural entity. Even if it doesn't, though, a character may be portrayed as The Bore or a stick-in-the-mud for not believing in a supernatural thing, person, or creature that turns out to actually exist. While these characters are always factually wrong, they're often portrayed as morally wrong or having the wrong attitude as well. This can be particularly annoying to audiences if the thing really was unlikely to exist within the show's universe. Commonly seen in a Saving Christmas plot involving Santa.
  • A character's actions appear immoral when viewed in isolation, but are actually justified given the circumstances: One of the best examples here would be the many superhero works which play the Thou Shalt Not Kill card as the hero has the villain on the ropes. In quite a few cases, the villain will have killed innocent people after either escaping from prison multiple times, proving to be too influential to prosecute, or otherwise being in such a position that killing them is the only way to ensure that they don't kill anyone else.
  • The thing has legitimate negative effects, but also benefits which are downplayed or ignored: For instance, the message "New Technology Is Evil" (or a similar Fantastic Aesop involving magic) is often delivered as follows: The story introduces some piece of Applied Phlebotinum which proves to be greatly useful to the characters (either solving some problem they were facing or otherwise making their lives easier). Then, something bad happens as a result of someone either using the thing carelessly or using it to excess. Yet rather than learning to use the thing wisely, the characters decide that they're better off without it, happily throwing the baby out with the bath water.

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