Is there a German word for the page quote? As German, I can't seem to come up with one.
How about Montana Max from Tiny Toon Adventures? Sure, he's a pint-sized Yosemite Sam expy, forever makes trouble, and deserves what he gets...but Danny Cooksey, the voice of Monty, asked why Max always has to be the loser and the jerk. The writers responded with a couple of Pet the Dog scripts ("Fit to be Toyed", "My Dinner With Elmyra") in which you actually kind of get to like him.
Edited by 64.233.152.49 Hide / Show Replies
Seems more like Redeeming The Jerkass (which isn't a trope, but you get the idea).
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Dean Winchester a Jerkass Woobie? I'm really not sure it fits. He can be a jerk, but really. Considering he is usually putting himself in harms way. I usually want to punch him because he's an Extreme Doormat
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I... I don't know what to think of this one. The wording is extremely biased in favor of Snape and in derision of Ron and Harry, so to me it seems that it put Harry and Ron here more to make them look bad than to give them pity. I think it needs to be re-written with less bias.
- Severus Snape. He too often takes out the fact that Harry's father was a sadistic prick of a bully on Harry; starting from the first time they meet, Snape is extra harsh and demanding of "The Chosen One." But when you find out just why he's such a troubled man, wracked with anger, sadness and guilt, and why the sight of Harry rises in him such passionate anger - not to mention when you see the types of machinations he's had to deal with to ensure the defeat of Voldemort, including what was thought to be his Moral Event Horizon in murdering Dumbledore - it's hard not to understand why he's so bitter and feel sorry for him. It's also hard not to still want him to grow the fuck up and deal with his issues already.
- Ron Weasley: Woobie because he's The Unfavorite (or so he thinks) in his family, his best friend is The Boy Who Lived, and in a family of talented, popular, all-Gryffindor witches and wizards he never comes off as much braver or more talented than Harry (who is, as Snape often rightly points out, quite mediocre at magic outside of a few select spells, like Expecto Patronum and Expelliarmus). Jerkass because he's by far the least mature of the trio (running away essentially because Horcrux-hunting wasn't the great camping trip he'd expected in Deathly Hallows, and calling Harry a liar and an attention-seeking "prat" in Goblet Of Fire), he's incredibly tantrum-prone, and he's entirely too jealous for his own good (treating Hermione like shit because he thinks she may have kissed Viktor Krum, a suspicion which was set off when he caught his little sister snogging her boyfriend).
- Harry is a Jerkass Woobie, too. Yes, he's got a lot of things on his plate, what with being famous because Voldemort killed his parents and couldn't kill him, he's The Chosen One, the wizarding world can't decide if they support him or think he's a schizophrenic liar, and by Order Of The Phoenix his hormones are messing with his head. Those are not good excuses for yelling at your friends until you've reduced them to tears, deciding an entire House is evil because of two or three people from it, and refusing to acknowledge that, sometimes, your weaknesses might be just that (and not "moral fiber").
- J. K. Rowling considers Dudley Dursley to be this, as well. When asked what Dudley saw during the dementor attack, she replied that "he saw himself as he really was," a spoiled bully. She also claims that Vernon and Petunia abused Dudley every bit as badly as they did Harry, by giving him a massive entitlement complex.
I don't know, the section on Snape could use some tweaking but it probably fits.
The Harry and Ron sections are, of course, bullshit.
It's not over. Not yet.
Your Mileage May Vary. Every fact mentioned in the Harry and Ron entries is accurate - whether or not they make them into Jerkasses is subjective (as is this trope), but bullshit? Really?
Yes, it's bullshit. Ron and Harry are two kids who grow into their roles after huge crisis, but the example here keeps bending over ot make excuss for AN ADULT MAN who refuses to grow up from his teenage grudges for several years (an inflicts lots of pain on kid hwo have NOTHING to do with it) while dragging two teens in the process of growing up in a very painful environment through the mud. This example is standard rabid Snapefen bullshit, not too far from the vile crap that is reported to this JF comm
: Snape gets excused and DILP-ed, whoever opposes him is bashed and portrayed as a monster.
Sure. Why not? Maybe we can re-write the Harry Potter and Ron Weasley sections, so that there would be less bias. But then again, do they really lack a mean side necessary to count as Jerkass Woobies?
Edited by Craver357
What? Everything they said was true. If it is written in a biased way, then we can rewrite it so as to not sound as biased.
I'm a Troper!!!
How the hell is Polanski still deserving of his Woobie status? He's repeatedly tried to play up his crapsack life as an excuse for drugging, sexually assaulting, raping and sodomising a thirteen-year-old girl, pleading guilty (albeit to a lesser charge, but still one worthy of, then fleeing the country to somewhere that won't extradite him, and continuing to make movies while avoiding the law. How he was ever permitted bail is beyond me, considering that he's a demonstrated flight risk. He is not a Jerkass Woobie, he is a felon and a fugitive.
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Good question. Moving the whole Real Life folder here...
- Christian Weston Chandler, the true and honest creator of Sonichu. He is a narcissistic jerk who routinely does horrible things, but he's just so pathetic (and easy to troll) that it's hard to feel anything but pity if you're charitable or contempt if you're not. Several people have attempted to reach him and help him, then after coming up against a brick wall of Jerkassery turned to trolling him instead. He's like the most utterly ineffectual Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who happens to have acquired the mouth of a Complete Monster.
- There's also his father Bob Chandler. While he is openly racist and homophobic, you have to remember that he grew up long before the Civil Rights Movement. * He's also in a crappy mariage, two of his children seemingly don't want anything to do with him, his youngest son doesn't want to make anything out of himself, and his name is plastered all over the darkest parts of the internet thanks to said youngest son.
- Some consider Eminem this. He was abandoned by his father, his mother abused him, his classmates bullied him into a coma for being white, he had no future, a wife and kids to feed and he barely had a job to pay for it, his uncle died and his mother said he should have instead, his best friend was shot, and he had to deal with drug addiction from a young age. For the Jerkass? He's sexist, he mocks everybody, raps about murdering his wife, encouraged drug use, and basically acted like a gigantic tool for most of his career.
- Axl Rose. Ho boy, Axl Rose. He's a Jerkass to the nth degree, yes... but he grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian home with a physically abusive stepfather, and at first believed that women and sexuality were evil and that domestic abuse was normal in families. You both want to punch him, and hug him and give him hot chocolate. Top it off with alienating all the original members of Guns N Roses due to the jerkassery and essentially disappearing off the face of the planet in the mid-late 90s, and you have quite a woobielicious recipe.
- H.P. Lovecraft. Quite racist and antisemetic, but also sickly, often terribly poor, and chronically depressed. His family, whom he loved, died when he was quite young. He eventually died at age 46 of malnutrition and intestine cancer after suffering constant pain for a year.
- Alexander Hamilton. He was born of illegitimite birth, his father abandoned his family when he was 10, his mother died two years later, and his cousin who was taking care of him and his older brother committed suicide. He was an elitist, in favor of a strong federal government, and a national bank that would have benefited banks and not the common man. It's not THAT bad, but since he has such a bad rep he's considered a Jerkass.
- What about Virginia Woolf? She lost her parents and her half-sister at an early age, was sexually harassed by her brothers and, upon having her house bombed during the war, finally snapped and drowned herself. Nicole Kidman's performance as Woolf in The Hours is terrifically woobiesh. But at the same time, she wasn't an easy person to be around and abused her Nice Guy life partner with antisemitic insults.
- Whatever can be said about Glenn Beck (and there's, uh, a lot), the guy did have pretty tragic beginnings: his mother, who had chemical addictions and manic-depressive fits, died when he was fifteen; one of his brothers committed suicide, to which Beck responded to becoming a drug addict, and still is still recovering. So borderline woobie- he's still kinda nuts...
- No matter how you feel about Aileen Wuornos, theres no denying she had a terrible life. Her mother left her, father committed suicide, grandfather brutally beat and raped her, has burn marks from playing with fire as a child, neighborhood kids threw rocks at her, baby taken off her, made homeless and forced to sleep in snow at 13, forced into prostitution as child, her brother died of cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized due to beatings and rapes by Johns including a broken pelvis. And then she started to strike back and murder a row of men...
- George Osborne. He may be a baronet in waiting, he may be rich, and he may, not least, be slashing the UK budget to a point of making anyone unlike him suffer. He may also, probably more pertinently, make your brain scream "Toryboy! Toryboy!" every time he opens his mouth or so much as appears on TV. Still, for what it's worth: his parents christened him Gideon, he seems to have spent school and university, if not beyond, as a bully magnet, even among his fellow Upper-Class Twit group, and, on top of what may possibly be an unrequited crush on David Cameron, displacement by Nick Clegg, and a squeaky voice, he's been Mind Game Ship targeted by Peter Mandelson. Of course, if you're a target of his slash-and-burn budget, this is unlikely to generate much warmth in his direction, unless it's the Burn the Witch! kind.
- Meriwether Lewis. Read some of his comments on American Indian women and you'll pretty much just want to kick his racist, sexist ass. However, he was at least clinically depressed, possibly bipolar, and he was also a hypochondriac and an alcoholic, and he was rewarded for his service to the republic with a high-stress job that exacerbated all of these conditions and also landed him with a bunch of political enemies out for blood. Oh, and despite being a genuine hero, when he tried to find a wife, he repeatedly struck out. And while this may have simply been due to his Jerkass side, there is also reasonable speculation that he was a repressed gay man and in unrequited love with William Clark, and even if he wasn't in love with Clark, it's pretty clear that he felt a stronger attachment toward his friend and co-commander than was noticed or reciprocated. When he finally set out for Washington to deal with various political and financial messes he'd gotten entangled in, he was supposedly so broken that he deliriously believed Clark was coming to his rescue and called out for him just before shooting himself multiple times, drunkenly managing to botch his own suicide despite being a crack shot. And he was only 35! Of course, some believe this wasn't suicide, but murder by said enemies, but either way, he was definitely a first-class Woobie.
- Roman Polanski. He had to go into hiding to escape from Nazis as a child, his mother died in Auschwitz and his pregnant wife murdered by Manson family. And then he did... what everyone knows he did.
- Vince Neil from Motley Crue. If you read The Dirty you'll be struck by what an arrogant, selfish and irritating man he is — but you heart will go out to him when you read his chapter on his daughter' s death.
- Cats are nature's jerkass woobie.
This is a fandom reaction trope to a character who's a jerk but lovable anyway. Real Life doesn't have a fandom, just individuals who have varying reactions to different public figures, and some of them are bound to get offended by the inclusion of a certain figure that they don't find lovable. Calling Roman Polanski a Jerkass Woobie goes way over the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement line, and in general, this trope can't be objectively applied to real life. One person's real life Jerkass Woobie is someone else's plain old jerkass.
If we want to save these entries somewhere, maybe splitting the Troper Tales page into "Personal Jerkass Woobies" and "Public Jerkass Woobies" folders, and listing these under the public folder, would work. That way it's clearer that these are famous JW's for the tropers who wrote them, and that YMMV.
Edited by Ajobforsuperman "And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!"
Yes Roman Polanski is a jerkass but thats why he's a jerkass woobie rather than a regular woobie. His victim says she feels sorry for him so . . .
So if it is not a good thing to list real people down as jerkasses, then why is it not nice to call any of the real people Jerkass Woobies? Is it too controversial or something?
Edited by Craver357
I'm somewhat new to the lingo. Is Alex in A Clockwork Orange a Jerk-Ass Woobie? That's what some critics seem to think anyway - that the film was actually very sympathetic to Alex.
There is an issue with this page. Even though it's YMMV, it doesn't generate the red bullet for some reason. This makes it hard to weed out.
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never mind, figured out the problem. secondary bullet points seem to override the red dot for some reason.
Exactly why was the Troper Tales page for this deleted? Because people will see what one has to say about a person they might feel fits this trope and they'll disagree and think they're only one side of it?
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We just axed the namespace so the question is mostly irrelevant now.
Are we still looking for a picture? Might I suggest Seltyiel, the iconic Pathfinder Jerkass Woobie Eldritch Knight? (I believe images offered as downloads from the Paizo blog are up for grabs.)
Plus, he's a White-Haired Pretty Boy who seems to have been preemptively dressed in leather.
Uh, regarding the picture...is it really appropriate for this page, when put in context? Being stabbed through the eye and disemboweled is bound to piss a person off, if they're still alive. Going into a murderous rage as a result isn't really representative of jerkassery. Granted, Asuka is a Jerkass Woobie, but this picture doesn't fit.
Can we get something better? Maybe a comparison image?
Edited by NatTheWriter Hide / Show Replies
I agree we could probably do better, but I'm not sure what you mean by "a comparison image". One thought I had was you put a pic of character A being a jerkass and then the same character being a woobie. For example:
- Sil'lice, head torturer of Sarghress castle, single mother, and exiled princess.
Yes, that's what I mean by a comparison picture. One image of the character being a jerkass, one of them being a woobie.
For example: a tsundere thfwacking someone on the head followed up by a pic of her crying.
No specific character comes to mind at the moment, sadly.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Should this be subjective?
, started by FrodoGoofballCoTV on Dec 16th 2010 at 12:52:59 AM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman