Alternative Character Interpretation/Real Life: Difference between revisions

** 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.

** 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 [[Springtime for Hitler|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.

* [[American Idol|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 [[Troll|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]].

* [[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.

* 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, [[Hurricane of Euphemisms|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 [[Hatedom|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".

* 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?

* Has [[Charlie Sheen]] [[Took a Level in Jerkass|gone over the top in rudeness]] and [[Cloudcuckoolander|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?

* The academic discipline of history '''is''' this trope applied to real life. [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment|No specific examples, please]].

** After all - history ''is'' written by the victors.

** 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'.

** 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.