Basic Trope: Character meant to depict the audience is shown negatively.
- Straight: Bob is a lazy, whiny, and unattractive ditz, whose function in the story is to represent the audience.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is so spineless, hideous, hateful, and impossibly stupid that this causes the audience (intentionally or otherwise) to hate him with a passion, despite that Bob is supposed to portray them.
- Bob is actually in a Show Within a Show, and there's another character outside of the inner show which exhibits the same qualities, and also represents the audience.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is a normal guy with positive as well as negative qualities, but sometimes the show uses Bob to deliver a Take That! or Space Whale Aesop at specific problems the creator sees with the audience.
- Bob is a Kavorka Man, Brilliant, but Lazy, or otherwise combines pathetic surface traits with surprising competence in his areas of expertise.
- Justified: ???
- Inverted:
- Bob is a sympathetic and/or admirable character whom the audience is meant to identify with—e.g., a comic book character who is a big comics nerd, who is hardworking, intelligent, cool, and his knowledge and passion about comic books help him defeat the challenges and villains he is faced with.
- Bob is an Expectation Lowerer, not an Audience Surrogate.
- Patrick Stewart Speech aimed both on the in-universe and the meta levels.
- Subverted:
- At first, Bob seems pretty pathetic. But he ends up showing Hidden Depths when he leads an I Am Spartacus moment at risk of his own well-being.
- While Bob is displayed negatively compared to the rest of the cast, one shouldn't forget that he's a modern day man flung into the far future.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob seems pretty pathetic at first... and he is. He tries to lead an I Am Spartacus moment, but gets cold feet as soon as the pressures on him and rats out the real hero to save his own hide.
- Bob's portrayal isn't negative just in comparison to the much better future folk, but in comparison to current day folks as well.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Bob is shown to neither negatively nor positively represent the audience.
- Bob is not written to represent the audience at all.
- Enforced:
- The author is a Jerkass who feels that he has the right to target on less fortunate people that he hates in real life.
- The author is just looking for an excuse to insult the audience to make himself feel superior.
- The author targets people whom he thinks deserves to be ridiculed.
- An ad for a self improvement product needs to motivate its audience to want to improve. note
- Lampshaded: "You know you're not being any better than those so-called "losers", right Mr. Author?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: The author chooses not to create a character representing the fans since this will cause them to not watch the show.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "What is the author thinking about having Bob representing us? Is he like misanthropic or something?"
- Deconstructed:
- The audience catches onto what the author thinks of his audience via Bob, with people dropping his work in droves out of disgust. his condescending attitude towards all criticism wound up making said author a pariah in the business.
- Alternately, once the audience finally realized that Bob is exactly or similar to them, and how if they keep going with this personality, they would be no different or better than Bob, and when things go really bad for them, it won't be easily brushed off like with the male character Bob. The more rational, silent and profound members of the audience wisely decided on changing their own real lives for the better, so they won't be like Bob. They are immensely humbled, instead of being needlessly offended by this event, and the author is rather unsure how they would do next time, since said audience members are now learning how to be a less entitled audience of fans.
- Reconstructed:
- Then again, the audience loves to see how horrible they are, and they say that's part of the series' chame charm.
- The work also shows the good qualities of the fans, few as they may be, and they deem it an honest or at least neutral portrayal.
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