Misaimed Fandom / Web Media

Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Webcomics and Web Original works.

---

Webcomics

• According to the Word of God of Drowtales Syphile is "not meant to have much redeeming features, she lost them all over time. I wouldn't portray her as anything else." Guess who's treated as The Woobie by a good portion of the fandom? Given the Grey-and-Gray Morality of the world it's understandable to a point, but now that Syphile's dead it'll probably get worse.
• Something*Positive:
  • Misaimed fandom is the point of this strip in which a girl thanks the author for creating a "good catgirl comic". For those who don't get the joke, the author had previously used "cat girls" to represent annoying teenage anime fangirls who spout Gratuitous Japanese.
  • In a Real Life example, the comic apparently got a lot of childfree readers early on. At first the author would just correct people who assumed he was supporting the movement, but later on he got ton of furious emails for adding Rory and PamJee to the cast.
• A rare positive example of this occurred during the fake "ending" in this strip of 8-Bit Theater. As he claimed in the blog post for the following strip, Brian Clevinger made the strip to piss people off and was later astounded to receive several e-mails of people saying how it was a perfect way to end the strip and thanking him for a job well done (even the ones who hated the "ending").
• Someone once posted this minus. strip on a board, decipting a child preparing to deflect a meteor with a baseball bat, without any context nor any link to the comic. Immediately people saw it as a Heartwarming Moment, an innocent child's dream of saving the world because nobody told her it was impossible (probably), that no one should ever lose hope when faced with a The End of the World as We Know It, etc. Of course, anybody who has read the comic knows that minus is a mischievous Reality Warper, so there is nothing "impossible" here, and that she probably summoned the meteor in the first place.
• Richard, the undead warlock of Looking for Group, does nothing so much as play jump rope with the line. He has an entire summer home in audacity. About the only time we ever see him is when he's killing stuff for the hell of it or making kinda Vincenty Price-y jokes. And "stuff" in this context means, well, you name it. Women, children, innocent bystanders, orphanages, whatever. It was well into the story before there was even a hint that he had any purpose or role other than as super-dark comic relief, or any redeeming qualities at all. Go on and guess which character seems to be by far the fandom favorite. Saying things like "I don't like to see evil characters get away with the things Richard gets away with" on the forums isn't quite going to get anyone flamed, but expect plenty of people to leap to defense of their favorite comic mass murderer. There are heroics in the strip revolving around Richard, especially in the more recent installments of the comic, so it's unclear if the character has a genuinely misguided fandom, or if he is being evolved in the comic progression, or if one has led to the other or vice-versa.
• It's pretty much impossible to claim Misaimed Fandom in The Order of the Stick without getting hit with massive amounts of backlash, though the contradictory positions means that someone must have the wrong end of the ten-foot pole.
  • Word of God eventually stepped in to confirm the "Belkar is Chaotic Good" claim as nonsense. He's Chaotic Evil, and not exactly subtle about it either. Yes, killing off a quarter of an entire race is evil, even if most of them are also evil. Not that it's stopped people arguing about it.
  • There's also the case of Miko Miyazaki who was a parody of a badly roleplayed Paladin (in contrast to more balanced characters like Hinjo, O-Chul and Lien) yet developed a following. Time seems to have faded most of it away, though there are still occasional outbreaks on the official forums.
  • Girard Draketooth, who somehow gained a reputation as a Properly Paranoid Magnificent Bastard by his cunning plan of hurling inaccurate accusations of treachery at a dead man and ineffectively trying to blow up a group of people who showed up to help him. In process allowing his loose bragging tongue to poke a nice round security hole. Put it down to Cool People Rebel Against Authority. This was both Lampshaded and Discussed in this strip, when fan-favorite villain Thog shows up as a gladiator. "No matter how many people he kills, the audience thinks he's lovable."
  • General Tarquin has his own (albeit minor) Misaimed Fandom. A fair number of the fandom still interprets Tarquin as an Affably Evil Noble Demon, despite all his appearances post-comic#913 and Word of God quite clearly demonstrating that he is a Faux Affably Evil, sociopathic Control Freak.
• NewRem Comics's entire fanbase is misaimed. According to Word of God, the main character is intended to be a deconstruction of an RPG Heroine's life after there's nothing left to save, not a cutesy nerd rage comic. It would probably help if the author gave any hint of this at all in the strip.
• Gright the Suicide Doll in Far Out There was supposed to be offensive, unsettling, and an attack on the sort of people who would buy such things. Much to the author's horror, readers have demanded actual Gright merchandise ever since.
• Collar 6: Early on, some fans have suggested that Buttefly may simply be an "antagonist" and not a "villain." This comes with the claim that her torturing Trina for information on Sixx was consensual BDSM.
• The Trollface meme originated from a comic lampooning Internet trolls. The comic says that trolls want to believe that they're driving people insane with rage, when they're being met with mild annoyance at worst. It also suggests that someone is only claiming to troll after their real opinions are seen as stupid. That hasn't stopped people from using the Trollface to represent actual trolling, in spite of the face's origins.
• Homestuck:
  • Many fans take whatever Andrew Hussie says outside of the comic, such as on the forums or his Formspring page, as Word of God that is unarguably canon. Problem is, Andrew is a Teasing Creator and many of the things he writes about his comic outside of the actual comic are intended as jokes.
  • Troll Romance was supposed to be comically exaggerated. It and the related characters ended up breaking the comic out into mainstream awareness. Similarly, Andrew chose to make the main characters 13-year-olds so that romance wouldn't come into play. Guess what comic has one of the largest shipping fanbases on the Internet?
  • The character of Kankri has made more people aware of the concept of triggers and has given rise to more fanfic writers providing warnings...despite the fact that he's supposed to be an obnoxious Strawman Political whose obsession with triggers is annoying and misguided at best.
  • Certain fans of Vriska Serket believe that Vriska was just doing what she had to to survive on Alternia, ignoring how the comic depicts her as pointlessly mean, incompetent, and hated by nearly all of her peers. They often bring up her "you don't need to be a good person to be a hero" speech as a Moment of Awesome, ignoring the fact that Vriska admits that speech was a temper tantrum she threw over not getting her own way.
• In Ansem Retort, Axel proposing to Aerith at the end of season 4 was meant to purely be a Take That! towards how most shows tend to end a season with a major Ass Pull, but many readers consider it to be a genuine Heartwarming Moment. The fact that they were already the main couple probably didn't help in getting his point across.
• Hark! A Vagrant:
  • The famous strip about Mr Darcy was originally intended to parody how ridiculously fangirlish women still get about Mr Darcy, because most of the tropes that made him sexy to the audience of that day no longer apply in modern society and because no-one could possibly live up to the sex symbol Mr Darcy has become in the popular imagination over the years.
  • A more straightforward example is Beaton's Strong Female Characters. Initially, Beaton used them as a parody of "faux feminist" characters used in fiction but several fans seriously think they are a parody of feminism in general. Beaton later responded with this comic.
• Misfile is a deconstruction on Gender Bender stories, where the nightmare of a boy waking up as a girl is played straight, along with the issues that transgender people go through. However, in the forums there are always people who can't understand why Ash doesn't just conform to the Second Law of Gender-Bending. Among the comic's trans fans, meanwhile, while there are many who get the author's intention and identify with Ash's predicament of being trapped in the 'wrong' gender, there are also some of whom see the premise of waking up the opposite gender as a dream come true (it completely escapes them that Ash was cisgendered before it happened).
• Matt Furie, the creator of Boys Club, got a real kick out of the fact that Pepe the Frog became an internet meme, but he was considerably less stoked about its adoption as a mascot by the alt-right, to the point where the Anti-Defamation League named it a hate symbol. He points out that the comic's Funny Animals are diverse, and that Pepe, being green, could not possibly be a white supremacist. He and his publisher eventually put out an official statement rejecting the 'nihilism' of the alt-right movement and describing Pepe as "a peaceful cartoon amphibian who represents love, acceptance, and fun. (And getting stoned.)" Furie eventually admitted more or less defeat in reclaiming his character, as he decided to kill Pepe off by depicting his funeral in a one page comic released on Free Comic Book Day 2017.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli was deliberately written as being socially and emotionally maladjusted due to his upbringing on top of possibly having a few neurological issues, the combination of which has landed close enough to Asperger Syndrome to be the Fanon diagnosis. He's shown to be a good and hard-working person at heart, but have No Social Skills, be extremely prone to Brutal Honesty and generally prefer to keep his interactions with other people at a minimum. The end result is that each time events leave him in a bad enough mood for a legitimate reason, he will be quite abrasive towards anyone trying to interact with him while he's trying to have some alone time, including people who are otherwise close to him. Such moments have caused some readers to treat Lalli as if he's an outright Jerkass being mean to whoever he's interacting with for no good reason. This becomes especially visible when Lalli enters a state of depression because of his cousin basically getting a death sentence, which results in him getting easier to "set off" and still getting "what a jerk" reactions, despite the fact that he cares very much about his cousin being the cause of his bad mood.
• This is discussed and parodied in a one-shot "Evil McBadguy" comic, where a comic creator, aware of this trope, intentionally created a 2-dimensional villain who outright says he should not be admired. The comic even lists some of the more infamous examples of characters with misaimed fandoms.
• The Oatmeal: "What it means when you say 'literally'" features a quote from anti-gay televangelist Jerry Falwell, in which he claims that a "homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way" as an example of the word "literally" being misused. The point is illustrated with a cartoon of people being run over by a pink-and-rainbow "Gayroller 2000". Although the point of this was to mock homophobes, some the image has since been appropriated and used unironically in anti-LGBTQ memes. The Oatmeal later made a tweet clarifying that the image is meant to be pro-marriage equality, in response to a right-wing publication posting an image of a giant rainbow steamroller destroying small businesses.
• The Virgin vs. Chad memes. Originally, it was a Right Way/Wrong Way Pair spoof that compared a "Virgin" doing normal things like listening to music while walking or trying to avoid bumping into anyone to a "Chad" who inverted whatever the Virgin was doing, such as never having listened to music or deliberately knocking people out of one's way. The Chad's side was a parody response to the Virgin's side, which was initially written to mock "loser behavior" but came off as making fun of normal reactions. Most Virgin vs. Chad memes disregard this and just make it a plain "bad vs. good" meme where the Virgin is something they don't like and the Chad is something they like.

Web Original

• Has been discussed a couple times in Cracked:
  • Examples are listed in ""The 5 Greatest Books With Psychotic Fanbases".
  • "6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy" lists tools used to prevent this reaction.
  • Played very straight with "The 5 Most Insanely Misunderstood Morals of Famous Stories".
  • And in "5 Horrifying Movie Characters People Idolize for Some Reason", which named Tyler Durden, Gordon Gekko, the entire cast of Goodfellas, Don Draper, and of course, Tony Montana, while commenting on this phenomenon.
    It's easy to understand why people idolize these characters. "Despicable" as they might be, they're being portrayed by literally the most charismatic people on earth. That makes them pretty damn attractive. Plus they don't take no crap from nobody, and they (for a brief moment, anyway) get exactly what they want. But so does a fly when it lands on a big, fresh pile of shit. So did Hitler. ... Just because someone is charismatic and fleetingly gets what they want doesn't mean they should be emulated. That's how we went from the character Alex P. Keaton to real life Scott Baio."
• James Rolfe:
  • Though most of the games reviewed by The Angry Video Game Nerd are just as bad as he says they are, there are a large number of viewers that didn't realize his first review of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest was deliberate Accentuate the Negative, and thought the guy who played him genuinely hated it that much (James Rolfe stated that the first review was done as a joke and he didn't really think the game was that bad). It doesn't help that he frequently brings up Castlevania II when discussing other games' flaws, notably long passwords. His Metal Gear review does a better job of what he was aiming for with Castlevania II.
  • He also mentioned in his second review for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) that, despite (or likely because of) how bad he demonstrated the game was, many played it anyway, thinking "It can't be that bad."
  • When Rolfe announced that he would not be seeing or reviewing Ghostbusters (2016) due to his disapproval of various creative decisions made during its production, many of his viewers have praised him for "fighting against the evils of feminism"... even though the all-female cast was not among his list of complaints, and Rolfe has never voiced anti-feminist opinions at any point during his 10 years on the web. Ironically, some feminist sites would also attack him for the exact same reason, also believing he wasn't going to watch the film due to its all-female cast, since they believed anyone criticizing the film only hates it because of the female cast, and not for the actual reasons they state they do.
  • As Rolfe's page on The Other Wiki notes, the original joke of the Angry Video Game Nerd character was that it was absurd at the time for a grown man to get so mad about video games. Ten years on, it's common to see ordinary forum posters with AVGN levels of rage, partly because the character's influence ended up making disproportionate rage about games a normal part of gamer culture.
  • The AVGN's character had another bit to him as well. He's also serves to remind us not to look at all the old gaming days with rose-tinted glasses. Most of the older really shitty games in the past are bad, but that's because it was all we really had to work with; clunky controls and all without much developmental thought. For every Mario, Mega Man, Sonic, and Zelda, there were equally bad games in those days as well.
  • The rivalry between him and the Nostalgia Critic was entirely a bit to promote each other's work, as Doug and James are friends in real life. However, some fans act like James and Doug actually are rivals, using the battle scenes to praise one creator and put down another.
• The critics over at Channel Awesome have quite a bit of this going on as well.
  • The Nostalgia Critic attracts a lot of this. Despite the fact that a fair number of the episodes conclude with him admitting the film's strong points, any YouTube re-post will inevitably have loads of comments claiming "he was so right!" and bashing the film in question (sometimes without even having seen the movie themselves). Whenever he decides to branch out out beyond negative reviews to include mixed and even positive reflections on a film (while still poking fun of it, naturally), he still gets backlash from fans of the film who didn't watch the review and assume all his reviews are of bad movies. He also gets a lot of fans who think he's a badass, manly role model, when Doug has said time and time again that he's supposed to a weak, pathetic waste of space jerk who's always getting the short end of the stick.
    • Hyper Fangirl gets this in spades. She was established as a Loony Fan who stalks the Critic and eventually kidnaps him at gunpoint to be her boyfriend, and is reportedly based on disturbing experiences Doug Walker has had with inappropriate fans at cons. Naturally, many people missed the point and found her actions endearing, rooting for her to actually be in a relationship with Critic, despite the show making it very clear that her attachment to Critic is out of desperation and she doesn't care for his needs. Even when this died down after her mutual relationship with Devil Boner got a more unanimously positive reaction from the fanbase and Hyper herself admitting that she's officially over Critic, there's still a Vocal Minority who still ship her with Critic. A good amount of people also forget that, despite her Character Development, she still has violent, narcissistic tendencies (which do admittedly decrease with time) and is not just a cute peppy fangirl.
  • The Spoony One is deliberately trying to accentuate the negative on Final Fantasy VIII and the other Final Fantasy titles; however, comments noting how subjective or flat out fallacious he could be, or even pointing out he was complaining about a game he outright admitted he never played (Final Fantasy IX) were downrated and flamed into oblivion.
  • Somewhat related, Lindsay has expressed annoyance that many fanboys seem to think The Nostalgia Chick is a "good person" when she's really a fucked up bitch with an Inferiority Superiority Complex.
  • How much of it is just malice is up for debate, but whenever Rachel Tietz did vlogs and mentioned missing Demo Reel, a lot of comments would muse that if she'd just shown her "tietz" the show would have lasted longer, missing her character's whole point of being angry because she'd been abused by Horrible Hollywood All Men Are Perverts for so long.
• Game reviews by IGSRJ, which serve as dual Irate Gamer parodies/AVGN tributes, not only include horrible games, but also games generally believed to be the best of all time, including Super Mario Bros. 3, Mortal Kombat and Duke Nukem 3D. He does a well enough job at Accentuating The Negative that reading the comments reveals that many viewers consistently either bitch about how wrong IGSRJ is, or more stupidly, agree with his arguments.
  • Similarly, many Youtubers fail to realize that the Third Rate Gamer is completely satirical in his reviews. He even puts up a disclaimer at the beginning of his Nintendo DS "review" stating that it's not intended to be serious, but the misconception still rages.
• Zero Punctuation:
  • Many people actually assume that because they find Yahtzee so funny, he is actually the Word of God and that the games he reviews are genuinely crappy. Never mind the fact that he is deliberately trying to Accentuate the Negative. Many of his reviews are just fixating on one thing that bugged him or attacking the fans. This is especially true with JRPGs and Fighter games, where Yahtzee deliberately insists that he really doesn't know that much about them and didn't care about fighting games, yet played 'em anyways, acted like he knew everything, said The World Ends with You was an okay game, and most of his Brawl review was pretty much insulting Fan Dumb. Unfortunately, if you go to the Escapist Forum, you'll find all sorts of people who claim that they were glad they didn't get a game Yahtzee just savaged despite that he said plenty of positive things bout it (Especially BioShock), insist that all fighters and RPGs are "Crap" despite proudly admitting having never played one in their lives.
  • Yahtzee himself has said that he exaggerates the flaws for comedic value, and that he 'praises by exception'. Anything he doesn't mention is fine or at least average, while if he takes the time to mention something's good in the review, he thought it was really good. He's also admitted his prejudices and that what he likes or hates may be the opposite for other people. Above all he just wants people to think for themselves and demand better than 'average' from developers. He's also gone on record in his earlier videos that "nobody likes him when he's not being mean" hence, the drive to sound angrier at games than he really is.
  • It was also particularly bad about Brawl, in which, before he reviewed it, a lot of people actually liked it. Then, mysteriously, after he said he hated it because it was a fighting game, the Escapist was full of people saying it was the worst game and they were glad they never bothered with it, despite that several weeks before, their posts said they liked it. Suffice to say, if Yahtzee basically said he thought sex was overrated, you can pretty much bet that the Escapist Forums will be full of people who have proudly declared themselves to be celibates or that they were always Asexual.
  • In the Zero Punctuation review of The Witcher, Yahtzee made a Take That! towards the elitist attitude of some PC gamers. Nonetheless, they seriously started to call themselves a "master race". This one is a Zig-Zagged Trope, as while there are people who seriously call themselves the "PC Master Race", the majority of people using it are doing it tongue-in-cheek.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series is actually mostly an Affectionate Parody of Yu-Gi-Oh!, with most of LittleKuriboh's hatred being directed at 4Kids. In case it's not obvious, Little Kuriboh is actually a fan of Yu-Gi-Oh. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of people admitting that Yu-Gi-Oh hatred is "cool" or calling it a "children's card game" for serious, and assuming that LK actually hated the franchise. Despite that his username is LittleKuriboh.
• The Greatest Freakout Ever, which has become ridiculously popular among teens and young adults as a humorous video. Any responsible adult who views it can only be horrified at the dysfunction it represents - in both brothers and in their parents.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: some people, as highlighted in this essay, are arguing that a large part of the audience seems to have missed the point especially in the way it tackled the idea of Disposable Woman and of Billy as a Nice Guy. Billy's complete transformation into the Dr. Horrible persona is clearly and unambiguously portrayed as a tragedy; not only because of the loss of Penny, but because it costs him the very humanity that his friend associates with. Some people are still going to prefer the Well-Intentioned Extremist Dr. Horrible over the nebbish Stalker with a Crush Billy.
• These guys are satirizing the Christian Side Hug. However, more Christian groups have become aware of the Christian Side Hug thanks to the video and have adopted it because they believe front-hugging is a public display of affection and that it can cause accidental sexual contact.
• Spoony created Doctor Insano as a satire of the idea that in fiction obviously evil people can be elected into positions of power. However several of his fans said that they would vote for him. Why? Because he is honest.
• This video, technically part of a film project that doesn't look like it will ever be made. It's really a brilliant expression, and critique, on the American potential for fascism. Needless to say, most of the comments are on what a straight-thinking person Derek Jacobi's character seems to be.
• Christian Lander started Stuff White People Like as an affectionate satire of his fellow liberal Hipster and Bourgeois Bohemian types. But peruse through the comments section on any of the site's pages and you'll find that SWPL tends to attract a large number of (presumably non-ironic) "alt-right" racists. Especially racists who went on to make spin-offs that miss the point and just list a bunch of racist stereotypes without a hint of humor.
• Urban Dictionary was created as a site where people can make their own slang words with their definitions, and also for other people to find out what (a) certain slang word(s) mean. However, a lot of people simply use it as a vehicle for their (biased) opinions. It's prevalent enough that the site's most popular entry for "Urban Dictionary" acknowledges this.
• Australian teen Madelene Zammit vents her frustrations against Facebook in an internet song with clear statements like "Na, I don't want to be judgmental towards people that I don't know. I'm sure you're nice, but your statuses must go," along with slamming people who post scandalous photos and creepy stalkers. Even after all that, she can't be too pleased after discovering her song was "liked" over 10,000 times by Facebook posters.
• The Germaine character in the Neurotically Yours series is portrayed as the stereotypical goth female teenager that hates men, doesn't take orders from the man (aka refusing to get a job because she hates being told what to do), and acts like her poetry writing is amazing and shows how she knows the world for what it really is. As the series progressed, Germaine is shown to be dressing more and more slutty and performing sexual acts on random men while also revealing her fetishes and what she would do to the people and celebrities she has a crush on, yet Germaine still tries to stay true to her views on men and sex. Viewers of the series kept demanding to see Germaine naked, which pissed off the author every single time and as a response to the requests, he decides to have Germaine grow very fat and shave her hair off to make her ugly. However, not only did this cause people in-universe to find her even more attractive, it caused the viewers to whine at the author to change Germaine back. In response to that, the author made a video where he explains for over 10 minutes on how the Germaine character is supposed to be a satire on girls that claim to be above anything sexual and yet go against their values behind closed doors.
• ProtonJon has encountered this a few times in his Let's Play videos.
  • He hates Super Mario World ROM hacks that abuse the use of invisible coin blocks and in response to the hacks that kept doing that, he made his own level that had over 200 invisible coin blocks in a platform like maze with a switch at the very top that reveals the level exit. He sent the level to some of his friends and one of them thought the level was just brilliant, causing Proton Jon to exclaim "No, you idiot! You're missing the point!"
  • Proton Jon's videos of him doing an LP of Superman 64 was to show people just how awful the game was, along with all its random bugs and glitches. Proton Jon admitted that the game was So Bad, It's Good and that was his only motivation to play the game. However, many viewers that saw the game in action started to make their own videos showcasing all the glitches in the game, which baffled Proton Jon.
• Youtube personality Dom Mazzetti exemplifies this.
  • The NYU educated comedy pair Mike & Gian created a parody of the dull-witted, hard-partying New Jersey Douchebags (as played by Mike). Not only is this sketch series their most popular, but has been accepted as a measure of bro-solidarity by the dull-witted, hard-partying New Jersey Douchebags it seeks to parody.
  • This character was so popular that they created a spin off show Broscience Life where Mr. Mazzetti teaches you the ins and outs of being a gym-rat. The problem with this show is that while the show gives comically bad advice "Don't warm up before you do your cleans", "Hurt yourself", etc., it intersperses it with legitimately good advice that frequent exercisers wish they could give out to the more uninformed masses: "If you're benching 135, don't ask me to spot you and then put 405 on the bar. I can't deadlift three hundred pounds!"
• Creepypasta characters Jeff The Killer And Slenderman are strange examples. One can sort of understand Jeff being a Draco in Leather Pants (since he had his psychological break due to extreme bullying, and the disfigurement he suffered as a result of said bullying), but SLENDERMAN?!
  • You'd be surprised at how much the Slender Man is idolized, despite the fact that he's an Eldritch Abomination that stalks people, drives them insane, and then causes them to vanish (it's heavily implied in some media that he eats them). Hell, the guy's original appearance as an image macro implied that he kidnaps and/or eats children.
  • Some of this can be explained by the popularity of the mythos he was inspired by — particularly since "Slendy" is more humanoid, and thus seems more "accessible" than many other Eldritch beings. However, this ignores that it's still an utterly alien being that operates on Blue-and-Orange Morality and causes untold destruction and suffering wherever it goes.
• A common grievance for Maddox as he attracts people he loathes. He even claims that his fan mail can be much dumber than his hate mail. There was also an incident where his fanclub hacked a website they don't like and while he said nothing of it, Maddox has stated that he hates hackers especially when they are script kiddies.
• The anti-pedophile group Perverted Justice used to regularly post lengthy logs of the online chat sessions members did to lure and expose pedophiles. They stopped after it turned out that those logs were actually being avidly read by said pedophiles.
• After Candle Cove became popular, many people began making videos simulating the titular show. Since the horror of the original piece comes from the fact that there was no show, only static that (for whatever reason) appeared as a show to children, re-creating it kind of goes against the spirit of the thing. The story's creator, Kris Straub, has stated that he doesn't care for the fan sequels or spin-offs because they try to explain or rationalize the deliberately vague and unexplained events of the story — thus negating the entire reason why it was frightening in the first place.
• The Team Service Announcement series was meant to give inexperienced Team Fortress 2 players advice on common situations. As such, the fact that people watch them mainly for entertainment has caused some Creator Backlash.
• The Raging Red Tide, a (borderline) NSFW web blog that parodies and pokes fun at Social Justice bloggers has Checked Privilege who was meant to be a one-off character joining Sweetie Belle to take down 4Chan. She immediately gained popularity (and even Fan Art) from 4Chan's denizens who think she's adorable.
• Similar to the Yugioh Abridged situation above, Dragon Ball Z Abridged by Team Four Star has attracted some fans who think that the show's jokes aimed at the story of the show are meant as legitimate criticisms or interpretations of the characters and story as to how they're supposed to be taken as, rather than just jokes at their expenses, as well as taking the flanderized personalities of these versions of the characters as canon, most notably Goku and Piccolo. While Goku's has apparently become canon as of Super, which even fans of the Japanese version have said has become a bit much, Piccolo is another case, since he was Gohan's mentor, not his adoptive father. Krillin has also become a punching bag for many, despite the guys themselves admitting that the reason they shat on him so much in the first 2 seasons was because Yamcha wasn't a part of the story during those arcs.
• Someone once pointed out some common traits about Gender Bender stories — most of these stories involve men turning into women and being unable to change back, these ex-men usually end up accepting or enjoying their new gender, and they submit themselves to that gender's stereotypes. This was meant to show that the stereotypical Gender Bending plot is fundamentally flawed, as the characters don't react anything like an actual human being would to their situation. Fans of the genre seem to take them as guidelines.
• Miles Jai's famous (or infamous depending on your perspective) MAH STATUS was made by Miles to protest the "Like My Status" trend going on on Facebook at the time. However, parodies of the video usually only include the first half, where he mocks the LMS craze by asking people to like various random things and usually leave out the rant, making it the parodies basically an endorsement of the very thing Miles was protesting.
• RWBY:
  • Many regard Team RWBY as the only main characters and feel that Team JNPR, Oscar and Qrow are a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, resulting in a backlash when these characters take centre stage, such as their focus during Volumes 7-8, or Jaune's arc in Volume 1. They desire the others to be Put on a Bus so that Team RWBY receives sole focus, and dislike Jaune joining Team RWBY in the Void Between the Worlds. The show itself is clear that there is an ensemble cast; Team JNPR have been deuteragonists since the beginning, even though marketing usually focuses on Team RWBY. The writers' confirmed in the supplementary RWBY: Companion that it was always intended to be a larger story, they just couldn't introduce that world until Volume 4.
  • The subplot revolving around the heroes shaming Ozpin was meant to serve as a stepping stone for the group learning to make their own decisions without the mentor's help. However, the way in which Ozpin is displaced rubbed fans the wrong way; the heroes' reactions to Ozpin, and lashing out at Oscar, indirectly proved Ozpin's point about keeping secrets from others. It's not helped by how fans believed that their decision to lie to Ironwood had little to no prompting, which — while meant to be seen as them learning why Ozpin kept secrets — came off to some fans as a moment of hypocrisy.
  • A significant part of the fandom is sympathetic to authority figures who uphold the law, which generated controversy during Volume 6's Cordovin arc. Fans perceived Cordovin to be reasonable, just doing her job, and that actions such as deploying a Mecha against trained Huntsmen were necessary; they were shocked and angry at the protagonists stealing a military airship, blaming them for consequences such as the Grimm attack on Argus. The writers portrayed Cordovin as petty, prideful and vindictive, so were surprised by the controversy; they wanted a fun, straight-forward climax without moral ambiguity to counter Adam's darker sub-plot, and revealed that the Atlesian military considered Cordovin annoying and assigned her to Argus because they thought she couldn't bother anyone there.
  • Ironwood has a devoted fanbase who see him as a strong military leader who can make the tough choices when his allies cannot, and who dislike the protagonists as naïve heroes endangering lives with their idealism. They feel Volumes 7-8 portrayed Ironwood as being the only person with a plan to save some lives in contrast to Team RWBY, who wanted to endanger everyone's lives due to having no plan to save anyone and no will to make the tough call to guarantee the salvation of some. They therefore believe that Ironwood was derailed into the role of a ruthless, impotent villain in favour of Protagonist-Centred Morality. The backlash was so strong that the writers pointed out that Ironwood had been portrayed as a deeply flawed individual from the beginning, and that he was meant to be regarded as unambiguously villainous by the end of Volume 7.
• Critical Role brought about a large Newbie Boom to Dungeons & Dragons — and with it, the Mercer Effect, where the fans of Critical Role expect every game of D&D to be like what's presented in the show.
  • Many a Game Master found themselves assembled with a table of fresh players. only to find that they either won't stop talking about Critical Role, copy character beats from Critical Role, or constantly say "That's not how Matt Mercer does it!" to the exasperated DM. Or a fresh player joins a table only to find the GM is nothing like Matt Mercer and the rest of the players are nothing like the core cast members. Not only have all of the show's actors played tabletop RPGs for years, but they're also actors who have been trained to get into character and emote properly, which is hard to find in the wild.
  • Others take Matt Mercer's "DM advice" videos as the actual rulebooks and refuse to deviate. One of the entire points of a tabletop game is that you can pick and choose what rules and make your own. The rules are largely a guideline — just as Mercer's advice is largely for you to get ideas on how to think and ultimately come to your own conclusion.
• Th3Birdman's "Everything Wrong with CinemaSins" video series has led to many believing that he hates CinemaSins and their content. Apparently, these people miss the memo (and blatant disclaimer at the beginning of every single video in his series) that he legitimately loves CinemaSins and that the entire point of the series is to be as petty to them as they are to movies. It got to the point where people accused him of lying about liking CinemaSins, which led to him making a video to address the issue.
• Related to the above, CinemaSins themselves:
  • Many people have actually taken their "Criticism" as actual reviews or indicators of a film's quality. This, despite that CinemaSins routinely uses Running gags, Manipulative Editing, and in-jokes as humour.
  • Similarly, many people also have taken them to assume that this is how criticism is supposed to be. The result is a lot of people who don't know that CinemaSins is a joke and this has caused people to likewise tell aspiring writer(s) and creator(s) to spell out literally everything.
  • CinemaSins also holds the amount of Bloopers against a movie as "proof" of its poor quality. This actually isn't intentional - there are numerous reasons why these things "slip past the editors" such as a lack of good take(s), genuine mistakes, or the blooper itself being so subtle it was assumed nobody would actually see it.
• The Onion parodies this with the article Man Wearing Cobra Command Shirt Missed The Whole Point Of ‘G.I. Joe’. A man comes to work wearing a Cobra shirt and all of his coworkers freak out, seeing him as having "missed the point" of G.I. Joe and how the shirt means that he implicitly endorses a fictional snake themed terrorist organization.
• Dorkly Originals video Mario Vs Minecraft sees Mario get humiliated by Steve as he brags about Minecraft's success. Mario demanding procedes for any videos of him shown online is meant to cast him as an Asshole Victim but Steve came off as an equally, if not bigger jerk, with his smug attitude instead caused fans to sympathize with Mario and view Steve as a Jerkass who deserved to be put in his place.
• The "Wow cool robot" meme format satirizes this kind of fandom. The original meme represented someone watching Gundam and only reacting with "Wow cool robot" while the show's War Is Hell themes literally fly over their head. Of course, people started making their own variants of the meme featuring other works or genres◊ whose themes are ignored in favor of admiring the aesthetics, or blaming the media itself◊ for making the things it condemns seem appealing in the first place. Another variant even inverts the premise, where the person zeroes in on the series' intended moral while the message that flies over their head is a comical oversimplification of the plot.
• This web video by Phil Jamesson satirizes the concept by having a character express their deep admiration for a "motivational speech" that is, in fact, intended as a Motive Rant.
• The Hard Times parodies the specific example of cops lionizing The Punisher in this fashion in the article "Man Shocked Meathead Cop With Punisher Tattoo Doesn't Read The Comic Books". The cop is too stupid to care about the source material, the guy who points it out is more conerned with the cop not "getting it" than the fact that he was being assaulted, and the union chief justified his ignorance on the grounds that the meatheads under her can't read and that the Punisher's initial villainous portrayal perfectly described them.
• Filthy Frank
  • The show as a whole has a very misaimed interpretation from many fans, hailing Frank as a cool rebel who challenges societal protocol by speaking his mind with no fear of retribution. In reality, Frank is a character explicitly stated to be "everything a person shouldn't be", most closely satirizing "edgelord" internet nerds who do nothing but troll for attention-seeking.
  • The "Weeaboos" video satirized people who are obsessed with anime and Japanese culture, and think that they can learn everything they need to know about Japan through anime. Many Filthy Frank fans believed he hated such people, calling everybody who demonstrates even a slight interest in anime and/or Japan out as a "weeaboo". This is despite Frank saying at the beginning of the video that he's got nothing against anime or people who watch it, and actually being born in Osaka himself.
• The Dream SMP fandom is rife with this.
  • The various events that happen on the SMP (such as the various wars and the election) are all just improvised roleplay done just for fun, with all the members getting in-character based on the ongoing event. Unfortunately, several fans believe they aren't fake, and have sent hate messages towards people that act as the villains (such as Eret, Quackity and Jschlatt). Fortunately, this seems to have at least somewhat died down after Season 1, with Season 2 onwards making the division between roleplay and real life much more apparent, though cases of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater still run rampant in the fandom, creating much controversy within, but that's a story for another day.
  • A very strange case occured in mid-2021 with people outside the fandom. In Season 1, L'Manburg was founded to be a nation with a staunch stance against tyranny and police brutality, and intended to stand as a "special place" for people to be free from it. Unfortunately, its advocation for freedom labelled it as a "freedom flag" and thus attracted attention from the alt-right, who waved the L'Manburg flag on the same pole as a Trump2024 flag during a London protest in late July 2021 against vaccinations against COVID-19 from the government (to help mitigate, you know, a global pandemic), which they saw as "tyrannical", without even knowing the context behind the flag. Three of the four founders of L'Manburg (Wilbur, Tommy, and Tubbo) found this absolutely hilarious, and when this got on the news, Quackity's (a later member of L'Manburg) response was to announce that Las Nevadas, his country on the SMP at the time, was offering free vaccinations.
  • This was discussed by Technoblade during one stream. He brought up a Twitter post he found in which numerous people praised him for not resorting to dark humor to be funny, when he was one of the biggest sources of Crosses the Line Twice humor out of everyone on the SMP (see here for more examples). He was understandably baffled by it.
    Techno: I talk about punching orphans literally every ten minutes! Whose stream have they been watching?!
• Unbiased History: The series enjoyed brief popularity among antisemites and white nationalists, most notably for the Hadrian "IVDEA DELENDA EST" montage, despite the obviously parodic nature of the whole series. It's meant to depict an exaggerated version of the ancient Roman mindset (hence why the narrator flips from describing Christianity as a subversive force to spiritual truth within the span of one episode). Not only that, but the earlier episodes contain outright insults towards /pol/ and antisemites more generally, which makes it weird that it got popular on /pol/ for a while.
• Kevin Temmer's "Delete This Tweet" animation, a music video starring a boy band called the "Trash Binz" singing to the viewer about how they should perform the titular action, has been used by people on websites like Twitter as a response to arguments they disagree with… except that the video itself mocks this kind of mentality, and not even subtly. Putting aside the fact that the Trash Binz themselves are literally anthropomorphic trash cans, they're visually emphasized midway through the video as being condescending hypocrites who gorge on the prospects of gatekeeping people, stirring up drama for the sake of it, or basking in the popular opinions of the mob or an influential figure, and thus aren't liable to be any better than the party they're accusing. Despite its unironic use in some circles (which, given the subject matter, was likely anticipated by the original animator regardless), it's clear that the video's actual message is that those who insist others backslide on their opinions so adamantly are liable to be, well, trashy.
• The "Stonks" meme is supposed to be sarcastic. Normal memes using the format describe someone earning money in an unusual and/or counter-productive way, and the "Stonks" image shows that they're ignorant about the issues with their methods and still feel proud about their earnings. So, of course, actual stock trading and cryptocurrency enthusiasts started using the "Meme Man" character as a mascot and referring to their earnings as Stonks.
• Some internet circles call this phenomenon a "Torment Nexus", after a Twitter post by Alex Blechman that satirizes the trend. In it, a famous sci-fi writer created the book Don't Create the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale, but a tech startup was such a big fan of the book that they built a real-life Torment Nexus as tribute to it.
• Campfire Stories: Despite both Mike and Zach (Zach in particular) being explicit about their time in the military being hell, with specific stories bringing up examples of mismanagement, petty bullying and being left alone in the middle of hostile territory, there's enough people proclaiming that their stories encouraged them to enlist.

---