Alternative Character Interpretation/Real Life

Advertising

 * For the new Cheetos commercials, The Cheetos Cheetah appears to people and encourages them to do something bad to people who are annoying them, which seems basis for a psychotic illusion for the mentally unstable.

Music

 * In "Behind Blue Eyes," the narrator could be an unrepentant Nazi being hauled off to Israel by a Mossad agent.
 * Keane's song "Everybody's Changing" could be seen as a song about a Zombie Apocalypse... from the point of view of one of the Infected.
 * The lyrics to the Coldplay song "Fix You" could be a song from the point of view of a heroin dealer who feels guilty after watching one of his customers waste his life. The hint is in the title ("Fix You", a drug fix), the constant references to depression and misery throughout the song, and little hints like "When you get what you want/But not what you need?" Who'd have thought Chris Martin was capable of such depth?
 * You mean other than Chris Martin?
 * Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me"--should we pity the Unlucky Childhood Friend, or scorn the Yandere?
 * On a radio station one of the DJs talks about how the video for the song has the Hollywood Homely trope (she didn't use the trope name) and the longtime friend didn't notice her till she cleaned up. There's an interpretation that he was actually asking Taylor Swift's character out in the video after his girlfriend dumped him and then she realized that her dream man had asked her out, she dolled herself up and headed for the dance.
 * The Saturdays, Ego -- Stalking Is OK When It's Female On Male? Ok, the guy might get himself killed if he goes solo, but the actions of the five girls does rather suggest an unwillingness to let the guy go rather than any actual concern for his safety. Sorry, girls, but he might just possibly do fine without you. Also, one has to wonder who's not getting rescued (or who's committing crimes and getting away with it) while five girls are too busy playing 'woman scorned' to do the hero thing.
 * In The Megas: is Wily a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is trying to ascend robots out of their slavery? Or is he the same lying, manipulative, power-hungry jerk he is in the games?
 * Same can be said of The Protomen interpretation of Wily.
 * "One Vision" by Queen was obviously written as a cheesy plea for an end to war, famine, religious intolerance and other problems pop stars tend to call "bad things". However, due to the vagueness of the lyrics, it's more than a little ironic that it can be interpreted as a fascist anthem from the perspective of a frustrated wannabe-fuhrer. The Slovenian art-rock group Laibach did a version in German for this very reason which they re-titled "Birth of a Nation".
 * "One Less Lonely Girl"? Really? Because you met up with her and are now going together, or because you killed her, Justin? (This is now an internet meme).
 * Most versions of "Windmills of Your Mind" are melancholy paeans to regrets and lost love. The Muppets? A paean to gibbering insanity.
 * The official meaning of Genesis's song "Mama", as explained by Phil Collins, is meant to be of a teenager who has fallen in love with a prostitute. However, another popular interpretation of it is that it's really about an unborn foetus that's being aborted (a belief that even the band manager shared).
 * The video is even creepier, and also supports the official meaning of the song.
 * The character of Nicklausse in Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), who in some editions of the opera is the Muse of Poetry in disguise, is sometimes suggested to be Hoffmann's conscience, who can only actually be seen and heard by him. (In at least some editions of the opera, no one but Hoffmann ever addresses Nicklausse directly.)
 * "The Man Upstairs" by Voltaire. The narrator is just as messed up as his neighbors; he's certainly paranoid, and there's strong evidence that he's manipulative ("If you want to be my friend, you'll have to prove you mean it.") Then, too, maybe his paranoia causes him to interpret someone perfectly normal and pleasant as an allegory for God Is Evil.
 * "Little Red Riding Hood" By Sam the sham and the Pharaohs, and a Song by the same name by The Cartoons, both interpret the big bad wolf as being in love with Red riding hood.
 * Julio Iglesias's 1987 song Lo mejor de tu vida (the best of your life) in which the narrator sings to a girl from whom he took all that's valuable in her (namely her virginity). Also, lots of verses allude to her youth at the time of the "seduction". This sound very suspicious, like what an sexual abuser would say to a victim (a child?), in order to make her feel worthless and dissuade her from having future healthy relationships.
 * Train's "Hey Soul Sister"; a nice little love song or an unsettling ghost story? The story takes place as this: a guy died from a blood clot to his brain (Your lipstick stains, on the front lobes of my left side brains) or commited suicide (And so I went and let you blow my mind), the ghost was very fond of her (Your sweet moon beams, the smell of you in every dream I dream), so he haunts her (I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight). The girl thinks that he is a ghost haunting her and takes he takes her fear as affection (Just in time, I'm so glad you have a one track mind like me, you gave my life direction, A game show love connection, we can't deny). The haunting is going on for so long now the girl is considering killing herself (You see, I can be myself finally, I want the world to see you'll be with me) and possibly goes through with it.
 * That officially ruins the song for me...
 * Katy Perry's "E.T (Futuristic Lover)" to me sounds like someone who has fallen in love with the person who has kidnapped, raped and brainwashed them. The Kanye West remix furthers my belief ("See I abducted you/so I tell you what to do")
 * The song. Is it a romantic song laced with some sexuality, or pure sex? Kanye's part of the song leans to the latter, but then again he is Kanye.
 * Is it about a romantic love affair from two different groups of people but somehow manage to be on the same wavelength despite the huge difference in their lives. Love Story (Taylor Swift) but with more sex...
 * Ian Dury's I Want To Be Straight deliberately uses this trope. It can be a song about somebody who wants to be on the 'straight and narrow', that is, wants to kick their alcohol and drug habits and live a normal life... or it can be about a homosexual who wishes they were into the opposite sex because it's more socially acceptable. The song can be interpreted as either or both of these.
 * Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, on the two occasions he's left the band. Reclusive genius or selfish bandwrecker?
 * Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats". Did he even cheat? Does she actually know whether he cheated or not? Is she justified in destroying his car if he did cheat? Maybe he stopped calling because he realized she was the type of person who was so crazy she was willing to smash up his car because she thought or knew he was cheating. Maybe he forgot to get the keys back, or told her where the spares are. Maybe the scene at the bar was her finally tracking him down after weeks of searching. She takes the bat, the Special Bat, she's been carrying with her just in case she found him, and peeks inside. Oh, there are a lot of people in there, and he's with some blonde "tramp". She can't Talk with him in there. Maybe she'll just leave A Message on his car...
 * Is the Gorillaz 2-D an irredeemable idiot, or Genius Ditz with wits dulled by head injuries and painkillers?
 * Whether you see the lyrics in "I Can't Do This" by Plumb as being "Oh, God, I need your help" or "Oh God, I need your help" depend on the person. The former makes sense being that it's a Christian band but the latter seems more like you're asking a person for help.

Professional Wrestling

 * Evolution Schematic, a column at 411mania's wrestling site, is all about alternate character interpretations, specifically about finding the defining trait that serves as a wrestler's focus through all his Heel Face Turns, Face Heel Turns, gimmick changes, changes of employers, and other such nastiness.
 * Matt and Jeff Hardy. Depending on which degree of smark you are, one brother is potentially the future of the entire business, and the other shouldn't even be working the lowliest of indies shows. You can swap out whichever one you like.
 * Ever since the new incarnation of ECW debuted, fans have criticized the third brand for being a nothing more than a pale imitation of its former namesake, even moreso after a gradual talent purge left Tommy Dreamer the sole ECW Original. However, some enjoy the new ECW for having the pure wrestling that Raw and Smackdown sometimes lack and its focus on making newer stars and elevating wrestlers that aren't ready for Raw or Smackdown. In fact, repeat that last sentence subbing WWF for Raw and WCW for Smackdown and you may have a decent show to watch every Tuesday that just fell victim to a PG mandate a lot earlier than the other two brands did but recently found its own niche. Taz, after leaving WWE, once said call it something else and it would a cool hour.
 * And after the early Executive Meddling by Sci Fi forced the WWE to add sci-fi elements to the show (failing miserably with a zombie wrestler), the Ent got creative with Kevin Thorn and Ariel, WWE's first vampire personas since Gangrel and the Brood. They even inserted them into brand's main feud between the ECW Originals and New Breed. Just too bad they didn't go with it.
 * Vince McMahon himself. Either he's one of the most brilliant showmen of all time and a man who should be hailed by all who would call themselves wrestling fans, or he's an imbecilic amoral scumbag who's only redeeming feature is that he knows to run with what's popular.
 * The Undertaker gets a lot of these, thanks to being Undead Druidic All-American Cowboy Biker, but the most popular one is, that during Ministry of Darkness era, he was Brainwashed and Crazy by Vince McMahon into believing he killed his parents and being more evil than ever before or after.

Real Life

 * Like it or not, Adolf Hitler is also subjected to Alternative Character Interpretation. Is he a Big Bad so completely monstrous he deserves the name Eldritch Abomination, a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who wants to save the Aryan race from a perceived Jewish threat, a misunderstood Ubermensch who tries to change the world through unconventional means, a compelling Magnificent Bastard Dark Messiah who wants to save the world from the Great Depression and end further imperialism by tricking everybody to consider him as the most evil man who ever lived, a Woobie who was just trying to use a Freudian Excuse (which failed spectacularly), or all at the same time? Your choice.
 * Or he may have just been a struggling painter who just really wanted to do what he always dreamed of... he just didn't achieve them.
 * "I can't get the fucking human figures right ... DAMN, I will kill everyone in the world!"
 * How's this? Hitler was the man who ended racism as a viable line of thought in the western world. By taking it to its absurd conclusion (and setting Europe on fire in the process), he forever destroyed its validity and made it possible for the civil rights/decolonization movements of the 50s and 60s to flourish. Racism was absolutely fine before the war and disowned afterwards.
 * Reviewing some of the things Hitler and certain members of the high command (like Hess, Himmler, and Goebbels) believed about Aryan mysticism and Nordic mythology, one could say they were (unfortunately high-functioning) cases of criminal insanity -- i.e., crazy and completely disconnected from reality with no comprehension of their actions or the reality of other people and their capacity to suffer. Our bad luck they happened along in a perfect storm of political upheaval and took advantage. Would also explain their Epic Fail at extended mass murder and domination, while the equally-evil but less-clinically-insane Stalin and Mao got away with it for decades. It certainly would explain why even the Soviets figured Hess could rot in prison for sixty years instead of being executed (he was evil, but also completely nuts and therefore not entirely responsible for his actions.)
 * Thing of it is, when a guy's killing twelve million defenseless people and making a serious try at exterminating two ethno-religious groups wherever he can get his hands on them, you probably just want to go for the pure evil interpretation even if others are more accurate.
 * Or he could have been an incredibly stupid yet charismatic leader. Whenever he was the one making the decisions in the war it ended in failure his bad boss tendencies stopped people from trying to fix his bad decisions. In fact you could pin the failure at Normandy as his fault because he didn't believe it was the real threat.
 * Here's another one, you could view his invasion of France to be either an unjustified and horrible action, or Karmatic Justice. Specifically because France was the one who imposed the worst of the punishments on them for WW 1 and filled the Germans with poverty and a crippling lack of national pride, among a list of other things.
 * This Cracked.com article analyzes Kanye West's behavior under the assumption that he is an eccentric genius who won't be properly appreciated until long after he's dead (the interpretation West clearly wants you to take), then reinterprets that behavior and the implications thereof under the assumption that West is actually clinically retarded and means every word from the bottom of his heart. Under this interpretation, things suddenly make a lot more sense.
 * Or he's a real-life Troll.
 * The Chicago Cubs. They can be interpreted as either perennial underdogs who always try their best to win the World Series and end their century-long drought, or a team that deliberately plays off its reputation as "The Lovable Losers" and intentionally loses each time to preserve any benefits resulting from being underdogs. The Cubs make so much money off of that reputation that, if the Cubs win the World Series, they will no longer have the distinction of being "The Lovable Losers," and, as a result, will lose at least some of their sympathetic out-of-state fans.
 * In his classic microeconomics book Defending the Undefendable, economist Walter Block offers these interpretations for a wide variety of common Acceptable Targets. Block's goal seems to be to deliver a giant You Fail Economics Forever to the people who think these targets are acceptable. For instance, he argues that prostitutes and drug dealers are heroes because they risk jail time to provide people with a valuable service while the cops who arrest them are clearly evil because they are kidnapping people who have done nothing immoral. He also argues that corrupt cops who are bribed to ignore drug dealers and prostitutes deserve some respect because while they may be taking their money, at least they aren't immoral enough to arrest them. Misers are also regarded as heroic because by not spending their money they consume less of the world's resources. Other Acceptable Targets defended include unregistered cab drivers, slumlords, strip miners, blackmailers, advertisers, ticket scalpers, inheritors, moneylenders, middlemen, scabs, and many, many more.
 * Vote for the Worst gets a lot of this. People hear the title of their site and come to the conclusion that they're a bunch of trolls trying to sabotage the show by keeping legitimately untalented contestants from being eliminated--a position that the notoriously restrictive producers promote. However, their mission statement is to vote for "the most entertaining contestants", the ones that will make the show more fun to watch--and if all else fails, the worst one, since they admit to wanting to vote for the ones that they believe the producers don't want to see win. Arguably, they're just applying the MST3K Mantra to a reality series--or rather, directly to its uptight producers. A case of Gray and Gray Morality.
 * As suggested by Dave Barry: the Chevrolet Vega. Honest example of engineering overreach coupled with underdevelopment, or deliberate plan to smear the very idea of a car in its' size bracket?
 * Christopher Hitchens was notorious for criticizing many people often thought of as being peacemakers, such as Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.
 * Paris Hilton is generally described as either a brainless Upper Class Twit whose success and popularity says something very depressing about modern life or an incredibly shrewd and ambitious practitioner of Obfuscating Stupidity whose use of a slutty, airhead party girl image to become famous says something very depressing about modern life. Oddly, very few people (or at least pundits) seem to consider her just a person of more or less average intelligence.
 * She is options one and three above at the same time. Humans Are Morons.
 * George Lucas has been suspected as being money hungry and out of touch with what made the original Star Wars trilogy so enjoyable, a victim of big egoness from merchandising profits or possibly having Asperger's Syndrome, resulting in the original trilogy having meticulously built sets and characters having little emotions along with all of it's success.
 * Similar to Christopher Hitchens above, Penn and Teller's Bullshit is also well known for presenting different viewpoints on a range of people, organizations and beliefs. Again like Hitchens one episode (which featured him) analyzed Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi. They've also gone after PETA, The Boy Scouts, the Vatican, NASA and many others.
 * The Austrian school of economics has one of these of the business cycle as one of its most notable features: rather than being something evil, panics/depressions/recessions/downturns are viewed as the economy correcting distortions caused by the preceding bubble (like overinvestment in the housing market), with mass unemployment an inevitable consequence of the fact that capital isn't homogeneous and takes time to be reallocated. This also implies an Alternative Character Interpretation of government stimulus: it's completely incapable of speeding the recovery, delaying it instead.
 * Herbert Hoover is victim of the Hatedumb variety: the phrase "Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate" is only attributed to his Treasury Secretary by his own autobiography, where he also notes he ignored this advice. Hoover wasn't laissez-faire by a long shot; a better description would be "FDR-lite".
 * "Good" and "bad" IT companies, from a hacker (in the original meaning of hacker - not the popular black hat wearing type of person) point of view. Both SUN and IBM have been portraited on both end of the spectrum, as "hacker-friendly" and "anti-hacker". In the 1980's SUN was seen as a company that produced a lot of hacker-friendly hardware, and IBM was seen as a commercial, corporal gigant, in the first decade of the 21st century, the roles where reversed. IBMs roles in using Linux, and IBM-SCO war have played a role here.
 * Many people believe that Bill O'Reilly is a hatemongering uberconservative that sits in his tower and rages against his 'guests' if they do not share his misguided opinions. But what if he and others like him (Glenn Beck for example) are actually intelligent people that simply like being paid to be belligerent and stir up all sorts of controversy?
 * Well, Dunno about Billo, but that's the truth about Glenn Beck.
 * Has Charlie Sheen gone over the top in rudeness and lost his mind? Does he have some brilliant plan in mind that nobody has figured out yet? Many theories have surfaced as to what he really has in consideration.
 * Is Dan Schneider uncaring about the negative reception that critics and some of his fans have brought about on Victorious and only caring about its success or has he been worried about the show's ratings lately, and trying to do what he can to cater to iCarly fans and their complaints?
 * Christopher Hitchens posited that the reason George W. Bush uses his famous "Bushisms" is because he is dyslexic, not stupid. On the third hand, it's always possible that he could be both...
 * The academic discipline of history is this trope applied to real life. No specific examples, please.
 * After all - history is written by the victors.
 * Sometimes written by the victors, but not always. A rather alarming case was after the American Civil War, where the dominant histories of the war were often written by Southerners rather than the winning Northerners. Naturally, these Southerners were quite bitter about the Confederacy's defeat, and did everything they could to glorify the "Lost Cause." It was years before they were seriously challenged, and in the meantime, pro-Confederate propagandizing resulted in a novel that was later turned into a book: Gone with the Wind.
 * The traditional archetype to this trope in Europe (or at least Spain and Britain) is Sir Francis Drake, the man who led the British naval response to the Spanish Armada and defeated them by setting fire to his own ships and sending them into Spanish ports, where they incinerated the Armada before they even left for England. Heralded a national hero in Britain, he is better known in Spain as 'el Draco'.
 * Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings: The Ace or Badass Bookworm who knew a lot about many things (even drinks, despite being a teetotaler), or a Boring Invincible Hero who proved what a bad idea it was to have unlimited wins?
 * IBM Watson is a sapient, full sentient being, understands the symbols it handles, and deserves full US citizenship.
 * Pretty much any politician during an election campaign: the candidates you prefer are good and possibly noble people, while the candidates you do not prefer are bad people and possibly evil incarnate.