Unintentionally Sympathetic / Looney Tunes

• Many villains fall under this category. While they are willing to eat the good guy, in terms of eliciting sympathy, the agony they go through far outweighs any harm they want to do. This particularly applies to Sylvester, especially the ones that begin with him out in the cold hungrily digging through empty garbage cans and his only motive is needing food: yeah, you (probably) don't want him to eat the good guy but wow you wish it would end with him finding a nice fish or a can of cat food to fill that belly of his. It's even more egregious in Looney Tunes Cartoons. While he's more prone to rudeness and condescension this time, the violence is also dialed up to roughly Itchy and Scratchy levels. He's furthermore typically seen homeless, starving, and miserable. It doesn't help that he reveals in "Holiday Purrchase" that nobody has even given him a gift before.
  • In particular it's really hard not to feel sorry for Sylvester in Canned Feud. Here, he is left home alone while his owners go on vacation to California, and they didn't leave any food out for him. Sylvester is understandably afraid that he'll starve, but fortunately there's a lot of canned food for him to eat. The one problem is that a sadistic mouse has swiped the can opener and spends the rest of the short tormenting Sylvester with it. Sylvester didn't provoke this mouse in any way and doesn't even attempt to eat him at any point in this short; he just wants the can opener so that he doesn't starve. Even after Sylvester gets the can opener, the mouse padlocks the cupboard so he is doomed to starve anyway.
  • "Museum Scream" is another short where it's hard not to sympathize with Sylvester. The short begins with him digging through trash cans desperately trying to find something to eat, then he sneaks into a museum at night to eat Tweety, who's part of an exhibit. Obviously you can't blame Tweety for, you know, not wanting to be eaten, but Sylvester is throughout the short attacked by a snake AND a poisonous wasp, crushed by a dinosaur egg, has his head bitten by a baby dinosaur for saying he's not their mother, gets sliced to pieces by a buzzsaw and impaled by an iron maiden — which then EXPLODES for no reason whatsoever — and at one point he gets stuck in a digestive tract display, which Tweety turns on after Sylvester makes it clear that he doesn't want Tweety to do that, sending Sylvester through the entire works. We're apparently supposed to find this funny, but a common complaint about the short is how needlessly over-the-top the violence towards Sylvester is.
  • This is particularly true for Elmer Fudd. The director Friz Freleng realized that he was more sympathetic than Bugs Bunny in some shorts. So Freleng created Yosemite Sam, who is more of a belligerent jerk and far less sympathetic than Elmer. Later shorts and modern Looney Tunes media in general seem to be trying to dial this down via painting Elmer in a more villainous light. In "Rabbit Fire", Elmer even reveals to Bugs and Daffy that he's actually a vegetarian and is hunting animals purely for sport.
    Freleng: I didn't quite feel that Elmer filled the bill. He wasn't really a villain. He was a pitiful character. He had a duty to perform as a hunter. He had to go shoot a rabbit. But there wasn't a mean streak. He didn't really like to shoot the rabbit. You wondered why you didn't hate Bugs for doing what he did to him.
  • Charles M. Wolf from "Hare-less Wolf" is a particularly notable example, as despite him trying to hunt Bugs and getting maimed for it, he's only doing so at the behest of his nagging wife, whom he rightfully hates and is made abundantly clear that she's more antagonistic than Charles could ever be. Despite this, the wife never receives any comeuppance, and the cartoon ends with Charles losing a Victory by Endurance while Bugs taunts him further.
• In the Daffy/Speedy series of cartoons, Daffy sometimes comes across as this. For example, in "Daffy's Diner", he's simply trying to protect himself from a vicious bandito cat who threatens to blow Daffy's brains out if he can't produce an authentic mouse-burger for him. He may have been trying to cheat his customers with rubber mice but he didn't deserve this. And yet, even though the cat is the real villain of the cartoon, it's Daffy who loses in the end. While, in "Feather Finger," Daffy's a homeless street rat who's just trying to earn enough cash to survive. And yet, in this cartoon, he also winds up being the big loser in the end. Nevermind that Mayor Katt was not only the one who really wanted Speedy captured but essentially conned Daffy into doing this deed for him. "The Music Mice-Tro" also suffers from this really badly. Daffy simply wants to be left alone, which Speedy and his band won't allow; yet Speedy is the one who wins in the end.
• Daffy in "Attack of the Drones". His only crime is this short is acting like an arrogant idiot. He creates the drones to defeat a pack of ferocious, sharp-toothed aliens. Then the drones go on a rampage and start acting like Bender from Futurama, and Daffy is screamed at by the head of the council, who tells him to tame the drones or else he's fired. Daffy attempts to tame them, but (predictably) his efforts fail, and he winds up getting blasted in half, impaled by a lightsaber, and having his front half eroded. Then when he finally thinks that he's been able to destroy the drones, it turns out that the drones found the cloning machine that Daffy used to create them in the first place and have started making MORE drones. The cloning machine, and the building that it's in, eventually explodes after filling up with drones, who then overrun the city. The short ends with Daffy clinging to the top of a building as the drones snap at him from below. So essentially, Daffy is violently punished for attempting to defeat an alien menace.
• Porky Pig is this in "My Generation G... G... Gap". He's afraid that his daughter will get into trouble at the rock concert that she's attending and tries to sneak in to get her out. This apparently means that we're supposed to laugh when he gets sliced into three by power lines, smashed around like a guitar, electrocuted several times, and finally humiliated.

---