Misaimed Fandom/Literature

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Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Literature.

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• The point of Fight Club is that although Tyler Durden does have valid criticism of consumer culture, lessons that people could genuinely improve their lives by following, Tyler takes it to a murderous extreme, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The idea is to show the downsides of both rampant materialism and the sexy, cool nihilism of Tyler Durden, promoting a balanced viewpoint. There's a significant misaimed fandom that misses the point entirely; however, the entire point of "WWTDD? (What Would Tyler Durden Do?)" is to get people to stop blindly accepting consumer culture, with an ironic twist. Unless the wearer is an idiot, which happens a lot, too.
• The Iron Dream, an Alternate History novel by Norman Spinrad, presents itself as a work of literary criticism about a fantasy novel -- "Lord of the Swastika" -- written by a version of Adolf Hitler who left Germany in 1919. Norman Spinrad's intent was to portray the similarities between fantasy tropes (such as Always Chaotic Evil) and the beliefs that facilitated many Real Life horrors. Ironically, the American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list despite the satirical intent of the work. In Spinrad's own words:

To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point...

• Isaac Asimov's short story The Fun They Had was intended it to be ironic; he hated school as a child because the classes were paced for less able students and he did not get along with his teachers. Many people, though, miss the intended irony (having forgotten just how bad school is) and take the story's concluding sentence at face value. It's even appeared in elementary school readers, presumably to get kids to appreciate school...
• Dean Koontz takes special care to depict his villains as petty-minded Complete Monsters, yet when compared to the heroes - who are not only Nice Guys but are often judgmental, preachy and self-righteous, and downright irritating when humor is attempted - this often makes his villains far more interesting characters. Even if the villains wants to murder innocent people or destroy mankind, they usually have nice houses, clear motivations and the determination to reach them, Evil Virtues, and often cool powers resulting in Misaimed Fandom. As result, in recent books, Dean Koontz has been trying to make his heroes even more virtuous Deadpan Snarkers and giving his villains even less intelligence, depth, personality or backstory with even more pointlessly evil goals that could never succeed. It doesn't always work, and the villain is still more interesting to read about, proving that even when the author goes out to say that Being Evil Sucks, some readers will still say Evil Is Cool.
• The relationship between Almasy and Katherine in The English Patient is a dangerous, destructive obsession that ends up claiming not only both of their lives but also the life of Katherine's husband. Yet it's held up by many as one of the greatest love stories of its time, perhaps due to the film adaptation glorifying the affair more than the book had.
  • See also the Misaimed Fandom of Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom of the Opera. Romantic relationships seem to possess a strong tendency to fall into this trope. Romeo and Juliet deserves a special mention here, with many people seeing it as an example of 'perfect' love, instead of a story about how love can cause people to make bad decisions and result in loss. This is evident in common perceptons of the term 'star crossed lovers' as something romantic, rather than 'fated to bad ends'.
• Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi (written back in the 1920s) was supposed to be a criticism of Western influences against Japanese tradition. Many women who read it began to emulate the main female character (becoming independent, fashionable, and non-traditional, like the Flappers of the era) instead of understanding the author's intent.
• Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was written as a socialist piece to show the plight of industrial workers. But, due to Sinclair's disturbingly graphic descriptions of what was going into the nation's meat, the government stepped in and created the FDA and passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which requires ingredient listings on all foodstuffs. Sinclair commented on this in later years:

"I aimed for the public's heart, and by mistake, I hit the public's stomach."

• • It goes beyond that; Sinclair actually opposed the Pure Food and Drug Act, as it shifted the cost of food inspection onto the federal government and away from the meat packing industry.
• The Secret History's central character, Henry Winter, has had fans gushing about how 'perfect' he is and how he's ideal boyfriend material. We're talking about a man who organises a bacchanal and accidentally kills someone, murders one of his friends, and was planning to kill another of his friends before he decides to commit suicide.
  • TSH in general has a case of this -- fittingly, in some ways, given Richard's desire for the picturesque at all costs.
• Italy's fascist government approved a film version of Ayn Rand's We the Living (without her permission) on the grounds that it was anti-communist. Several months after the film's release, it was pulled when the government realized the story was just as much anti-fascist.
• In 19th century Northern California, author Bret Harte, who opposed racial discrimination, wrote the narrative poem "The Heathen Chinee" to satirize anti-Chinese sentiment, which was widespread at the time. Readers of the poem and the periodicals that reprinted it widely interpreted it as mocking the Chinese. It was often recited by opponents of Chinese immigration, and Harte was thanked by a Senator who held anti-Chinese sentiment. Harte later heavily disparaged the poem, but it still became one of the most popular among the anti-Chinese movement.
• Reportedly, a British Secretary of State for Education once told Muriel Spark they greatly admired the title character of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Since Miss Brodie was a Sadist Teacher who encouraged one of her favourites to fight for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Mrs. Spark looked somewhat horrified at the notion.
• A lot of people who are politically on the right cite George Orwell's 1984 as an argument against leftist social programs that are creating what they perceive as a "nanny state". This is ignoring that George Orwell was an outspoken democratic socialist, and that Nineteen Eighty-Four was written to criticize totalitarianism (specifically Stalinism) and trends toward it among certain segments of the left - not liberalism in general, which Orwell viewed as not leftist enough. Orwell may have agreed with them to an extent on politically correct language, though, since he was a strong proponent of clarity of speech. Orwell himself directly refuted claims that he was entirely anti-socialist in his own writings.
  • Another common misunderstanding of 1984 is that it was genuinely Orwell's prediction of the future and what he thought the world would look like by that date. For this reason, many claim that the book is "no longer relevant". It is in fact partly a laying-out of Orwell's issues vis-a-vis much of the then-contemporary Left, partly a study of totalitarianism and partly a satire (things like the man talking in "duckspeak" are Orwell taking a jokey swipe at opinionated dinner-party bores who would regurgitating newspaper columns and the like as their own opinions - something that is fairly timeless).
• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, though clearly intended against paradise engineering, has its own following of people advocating the idea that Huxley's vision didn't go far enough.
• A Clockwork Orange. Lots of teens (and not so teens) tend to ignore the final chapter of the book ( where Alex acknowledges his wrongdoings) and start dressing up like him and even learning nadsat. It doesn't help that the movie made the message look like the exact opposite. This is because the final chapter of the book changes the interpretation completely, and it was omitted from most US editions. (As often snarkily noted, this is perhaps the only instance of a piece of fiction being edited for US consumption because it was too optimistic.)
• "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is widely considered a celebration of independence. But Frost, a diehard misanthrope, intended it as a bitterly ironic satire of people who delusionally fancy themselves individualists. Consider that the two roads are "just as fair[;] the passing... had worn them really about the same". "I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence" does not describe laudable independence: it portrays self-obsessed, melodramatic braggadocio dredged up again and again over the course of a boring life. See more here.
• Similarly, "Mending Wall", with its refrain of "Good fences make good neighbors." This is what the narrator's neighbor says and is the most remembered line. The narrator himself does not believe that the wall he and his neighbor are putting so much effort into mending is worth the trouble, since it isn't protecting anything.
  • Furthermore, the poem isn't exactly about your neighbors next door with the dog that barks all night. It's not so much of a white-picket-fence wall - more of a Mr.Khrushchev-tear-down-this wall.
• Gulliver's Travels was written by Swift as a biting satire. Instead of being recognized for its wit and vicious commentary on the state of man and civilization, it instead became a beloved children's classic. To expedite this, many adaptations only cover Lilliput; almost no adaptations contain any hints of parts three and four.
  • Really, most of Swift's work has been subject to misaimed fandom. The essay A Modest Proposal was meant to make the English realize what they were doing to the Irish, but instead people just laughed at the satire and did nothing.
• An example of this trope In-Universe turns up in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum. Three intellectuals, using a computer program and a smorgasbord of occult, esoteric and conspiracy-theory texts, create a "manifesto" for the fictional secret society "The Tres" as a satire of secret societies and the gullibility and fanaticism surrounding both these societies and their critics. The secret society catches on against their wills.
  • Eco likely based this scenario off the anonymously-published 17th-century Fama Fraternitatis, which claimed to be the manifesto of a centuries-old mystical Christian brotherhood, the Rosiscrucians. The work eventually inspired a number of rival Rosicrucian societies, even though many historians consider the work an elaborate hoax; not only is there no evidence for the existence of such a movement prior to the 18th century, but the Fama was initially published together with an obviously fictional comical story about an absurd, failed utopian "reform."
• Hitler's regime enthusiastically endorsed Friedrich Nietzsche's writings, particularly his concept of the Overman (übermensch), as a philosophical buttress for Nazism's ideals of "Aryan" supremacy and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche's Overman concept was an ideal for the individual to strive towards and had nothing to do with the pseudo-scientific "Aryan race" doctrines of his time. Furthermore, although Nietzsche wasn't pro-Jewish, he hated German anti-Semitic groups with a passion. The Misaimed Fandom was caused by Nietzsche's sister, who was an active anti-Semite, editing her brother's works to conform to her own views after he was too demented to know about it. It also didn't help that the best student of Nietzsche's philosophy, Martin Heidegger, actually was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and not just for the benefits; he never repented for having joined the party, although he did comment that he had joined under the mistaken assumption that Hitler would help in the program of "awakening" the German people to a better future (Hitler didn't) and that the Nazis stood for anything other than hating "non-Aryans" (Heidegger didn't, and actually had quite the case of Matzo Fever). Sadly, during and for some time after World War Two, Nietzsche had an undeservedly bad reputation in much of the world as a proto-Nazi -- hence the existence of the Nietzsche Wannabe trope.
  • It's worse than that - not only did Nietzsche hate anti-Semitism, but he also hated pan-Germanism and to a lesser extent criticised nationalism as well. See, for instance, aphorism 337 of The Gay Science.
  • Not to mention that Loeb and Leopold (thrill-killers; their crime was called "The Crime of the Century" at the time) were apparently devoted readers of Nietzsche who saw themselves as his Superman.
• Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice are often cited as the quintessential Slap Slap Kiss couple -- passionate dislike is just a mask for passionate love. But Elizabeth herself tells her first suitor Mr. Collins (whom she legitimately cannot stand) that this is a ridiculous notion and sometimes, No means No; not every girl who claims to dislike a man is in denial (otherwise, she may just as well have feelings for Mr. Collins!). A paragraph comparing Elizabeth's changing feelings for Wickham and Darcy clearly shows that the initial conflict between the Official Couple was just supposed to show how feelings can evolve in the real world as opposed to the Fairy Tale Love At First Sight. Dislike can evolve into love; nowhere does anyone imply dislike = love... except Mr. Collins.
  • A relationship guide, Dating Mr. Darcy: A Girl's guide to Sensible Romance, missed that the whole point of Pride and Prejudice is that both Elizabeth and Darcy have to re-examine themselves and change in order to be better people, and better for each other. Instead, you get this gem of a book description:

Any girl who has seen Pride and Prejudice or read the Jane Austen novel knows that the much misunderstood Mr. Darcy is the ideal gentleman. But is it possible to find your own Mr. Darcy in today's world of geeks and goons?...Best-selling author Sarah Arthur equips young women to gauge a guy's Darcy Potential (DP) according to his relationships with family, friends, and God.

• Among those who criticize Kurt Vonnegut, it is commonly stated that his novel Slaughterhouse-Five wants us to agree with the Tralfamadorians, a completely apathetic race of alien toilet plungers to whom war and death mean nothing. He's satirizing that pattern of thought in humans; to him, people who think that way are as ridiculous as living plungers.
• Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" is often taken to be a parable against socialism. This ignores Vonnegut's oft-professed admiration for socialism, and for socialist heroes like Eugene Debs. In light of this the story may be read as a satire of American fears or misconceptions of what socialism would look like.
• Lolita has a tendency to attract its own fandom that believes in the righteousness of Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze's relationship, or think that Dolores seduced Humbert - both ignoring Nabokov's intention to cast Humbert as an Unreliable Narrator. On the flip side, because the minority of the fandom who didn't get it are louder than the reticent majority that enjoyed and understood the novel, those who have never read the book may dismiss it as literary child pornography, which makes two groups of people missing the point.
• Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno have been under quite a bit of Misaimed Fandom from literary commentators, who often assume that they're being unfairly punished when, in fact, their dialogue indicates that their relationship was based on lust rather than love and that any love Francesca had for Paolo is gone, replaced by bitterness that he caused her to go to hell. The Pilgrim faints out of pity for the two, but it's implied that over time, he learns to stop feeling sorry for the sinners.
  • There are also people who feel sorry for Count Ugolino. To be fair, in some translations it is not obvious that he killed and ate his children.
• The Rise of Scourge manga produced a lot of this from the Warrior Cats fandom. Because of Scourge's backstory, a large portion of fans believe that he is not evil, some even going far enough to blame everything he did on random other characters. Of course, this interpretation completely ignores the author's belief that no one is born evil, and that everyone has a reason for their actions, but that these reasons are in no way an excuse. In fact, in the author's note at the beginning of the very same book, she says his actions were inexcusable, and that she wasn't trying to make excuses, also saying that "If ever a character were purely bad, Scourge is it."
  • Many haters of Ashfur like to call his fandom Misaimed and a bad case of Draco in Leather Pants, even though there's no proof that the authors intended for readers to hate him. Indeed, the evidence actually suggests otherwise: though she doubted that he wasn't a completely insane character, Victoria Holmes did describe him as a misunderstood woobie in a Wands & Worlds chat.
  • Word of God also says that she wants her books to be filled with morally ambiguous characters who nobody can agree about.
  • Most people who hate Sol either hate him because he's "stupid" (which he clearly isn't) or because he's trying to get get the Clans to stop following StarClan. He does take this too far, but most people seem to be more against the fact that he doesn't like StarClan than his methods (Some also claim that he doesn't believe in StarClan which, though not a very egregious error, is still incorrect). They make it seem like StarClan is the most important thing ever, and their word should be followed rigidly, which means that most of them are completely forgetting that StarClan themselves have been telling us for the longest time that they do not hold all the answers, and that the cats are essentially masters of their own destinies. They essentially only exist to watch over them and give out warnings.
  • Also, the Warrior Code, though very important, does not represent universal moral standards (You would think that Hollyleaf's Face Heel Turn would bring this into perspective, but no, no it apparently hasn't).
    • On a similar note, there is also the entirety of SkyClan's Destiny. The most popular reaction to the book is disgust towards/complaining about the travesty that is the Daylight Warriors. People regularly cite the Warrior Code as a reason for why the Daylight Warriors are horrible, both ignoring way the books constantly show that the Warrior Code isn't right, or that the entire point of the book was to demonstrate that SkyClan doesn't need to follow the other Clans' examples, and are free to welcome the Daylight Warriors if it is in their best interests.
  • Fans have somehow managed to take the series' message about racial tolerance and acceptance and get "Racism is Good". How this is possible when the series' main villain is A Nazi by Any Other Name will forever remain a mystery. There's a whole debate about whether the prejudice against outsiders is really racism or not. In the end, this doesn't matter; the point is that it represents racism.
• J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has frequently whined about the vocal fanbases of Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape. Part of it is that the good guys intentionally eschew the trappings of power, including mere refinement, which turns into Evil Is Cool and Good Is Dumb -- and almost Dumb Is Good -- with even the slightest fumble. And, of course, it didn't help that the movie versions of Malfoy and Snape were played by the easy-on-the-eyes Tom Felton and Alan Rickman, respectively.
  • Granted, the Malfoy family and Snape are shown to be the most morally ambiguous of the Death Eaters, with Snape leaning heavily on the good side by the end and the Malfoys at least not as unlikeable as before, but that still doesn't excuse the blatant ignoring of the nasty stuff they did do. And then, there are the folks who think that Bellatrix is the perfect feminist role model. She spends her entire time obsessing over Voldemort who, by Rowling's own admission, is completely and utterly incapable of understanding or returning love. While Voldy does show a few signs of affection for her, he also seems to have no problem at all torturing her and theirs is possibly the closest thing in the series to an abusive relationship.
    • It's also sort of interesting that people tend to mention Snape as right alongside Draco in this area, though Rowling seems far less concerned over people liking Snape than liking Draco. Then again, any time someone asks her who her favorite character other than Harry is, Snape gets mentioned, so... many people love him because of the actor, but just as many like him for the same reasons Rowling does. A lot of the vehement hatred toward him seems fueled by fandom rivalries, just like Sirius.
    • There are those that feel that because in the end Snape was working for Dumbledore it absolves him of all his sins. Which ignores the fact that he was still a horrible bully who abused his power. Seriously, when a thirteen year old boy's biggest fear is his teacher something is deeply wrong.
    • The chapter on Snape's memories in book 7 really helped show he was good all along, and put his actions into a broader context that made it almost impossible not to sympathise with him despite all he'd done.
  • Certain segments of the fandom treat being a specific blood status as better - missing the point.
  • There's also a certain amount of the fandom that tries to say that the term "Muggles" is equivalent to the real world's "chinks" or "niggers"; ethnic slurs. This despite the fact the canon very has a word that is explicitly stated to be a slur against those of Muggle descent who have magic; it's "Mudblood," though "Muggle" is used in a derisive way by certain bigoted characters as well.
  • If you go to Average Wizard or hang out on a fan forum, you can always find a certain number of people who think that the Unforgivable Curses would be fun to use and/or want or have had the Dark Mark tattooed on their bodies.
  • Since JK Rowling's admission that a Muggle with a shotgun will generally beat a wizard, there are several parts of the fandom who have claimed that Harry and Co. should've just sniped Voldemort. This ignores the facts that a)they're children, b)they live in Britain, where guns aren't as readily available as in Eagle Land, c)the general public has a more negative attitude towards guns than in America, d)sniper rifles take training to use effectively, e)it might've broken the statute on wizarding secrecy, and f)the last Horcrux wasn't destroyed until nearly the end of the last book, meaning Voldemort would've been down, and weakened, but not out. Their primary task was to destroy the Horcruxes, which would take away Voldemort's immortality.
• Descriptions of the Illuminati in Angels and Demons make them sound like they're a Misaimed Fandom of science, dogmatically and intolerantly plotting against the Catholic Church for being dogmatic and intolerant. Apparently, believing in Science means you never subject the antiquated grudges of your own secret society to the same critical scrutiny as you do the workings of the physical universe. Subverted in that it's not really scientists who are behind the plot, so the above view only illustrates how the real villain thinks science's advocates would think.
  • Just to confuse things further, reviewers' unwillingness to include spoilers when they discuss the plot tends to conceal the subversion from potential audiences, causing many people who never even read/saw it to assume that Dan Brown is bashing Science this time. Can you have a Misaimed Fandom of people who never actually read what they've misinterpreted?
• Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky was intended as a parody as how not to write a poem, and also to make fun of pretentious poetry. Now, however, it is used for serious study among scholars, the exact people it was making fun of.
  • When he first wrote down the first stanza of the poem, he entitled it a Fragment of Anglo-Saxon poetry, lampooning the fashion for things Anglo-Saxon of his day.
  • There's also Alice in Wonderland, which was just a silly story he wrote to amuse Alice Liddell and eventually expanded to include jokes on logic and mathematics. Most people today simply assume that it's all about drugs and sex and don't realize that it's satire as well as following dream logic.
• John Milton's Paradise Lost has Satan as its protagonist, but not its hero. Many readers actually sympathized with Satan, leading to William Blake famously saying that Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it."
  • Ever since Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin forty years ago, the popular academic argument is that Milton was subverting this trope. Under this theory, the reader is supposed to sympathize with Satan early on, and then be surprised to find out later in the poem that Satan really is evil and was lying all along. In a way, then, the reader symbolically re-enacts the Fall, and is forced to accept that they, too, have evil in them.
• Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho was written as a satire of the yuppie culture of the '80s, yet was subjected to massive protests by feminist groups due to violent scenes against women. Too many people read the book for what was written and not what it was saying. To add to the irony, in the film version, the title character was played by none other than Gloria Steinem's stepson!
• Pretty much everything Robert Burns ever wrote. He was trying to impress English gentry, using "quaint" Scots language as a gimmick. The gentry did not care. A whole lot of native Scots speakers, however, were delighted, and Scottish people continue to be his main fanbase.
  • It should be noted, however, that Burns was a Scottish Nationalist. In another example of Misaimed Fandom, Burns is commemorated by British Loyalists in Northern Ireland every year.
    • Loyalists who are also fiercely proud of their Scottish roots and who possibly disagree with the notion that to like a writer's work you have to agree with every single aspect of his philosophy and politics.
• Go to author Sinclair Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota sometime. In addition to the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, his grave site, and the Gopher Prairie Motel, the high school's sports teams are called The Main Streeters. Fact is, Sinclair Lewis hated his hometown, and his books (especially Main Street) are pull-no-punches scathing indictments of the hypocrisy of the "Minnesota Nice" he saw in the allegedly "nice little towns" that dot rural Minnesota.
  • Not that Sinclair Lewis was fond of the city, either. His works often boil down to "Yes, the city can be cold, cruel, and impersonal, but rural America can be just as cold and cruel, but it's always personal. Which is worse?"
• Agatha Christie unintentionally succeeded in making some of her most despicable murderers in And Then There Were None (such as, oh, the child-killing Yandere, or anti-Semitic Social Darwinist the most sympathetic characters in her fandom, if the artwork (and fanfiction) based on said characters is any indication.
  • Then again, it's often a trademark of Agatha Christie to give each of her murderers varying degrees of sympathy, so it's entirely possibly she made said characters morally ambiguous on purpose to let the reader be the judge for themselves.
• Partially because of the greater popularity and fame of the film adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which boiled down the story into being a battle exclusively between Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, a number of people argued about Ratched and McMurphy as characters. Kesey even pointed out that having a hatedom for Ratched herself (and debating a possible backstory to round out the character) was pointless. She is just supposed to be representative of the kind of repressive, conformist society bent on "fixing" people that would create a person like her in the first place and put her in a position of power.
• There is a growing amount of slash Fanfic based on Ayn Rand's books. Rand was such a homophobe that she's probably spinning in her grave.
  • To be fair, despite her negative opinion of homosexuals, she did support equal rights for them even back in her day.
• Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography gets a lot of readers rooting for the narrator, which has caused Comeau to reply, "Aw but I hate what he does." This might to some extent be a case of a character being mistaken for an Author Avatar, since both Comeau and his protagonist are openly queer and fond of sexy trouble.
• In the Black Jewels series, Anne Bishop stated explicitly that she was trying to explore and reverse some gender roles; The gendered weakness emphasized by stereotypical 'feminine' afflictions that didn't for a moment lessen the authority of the matriarchal society, the acknowledgment and exaggeration of how damaging sexual assault was by making the psychic trauma a quantifiable thing, the fact that rape or accusations of rape casts a serious stigma on the male perpetrator, not the victim and many other gender role reversals without making the behavior at all unrecognizable. Nonetheless, because bad things happen to women in her series outcry has been made in fandom that it's terribly misogynistic.
• One of the greatest risks of writing a story centered around Hidden Depths is that the readers will miss a character's Hidden Depths as much as his or her fellow characters. Many readers of Mansfield Park agree with Edmund that Mary Crawford is a sassy, lively, witty, attractive girl... but unlike Edmund, ignore the emerging signs of her disrespect for him, her completely unreasonable expectation that he will change his life path and career choice based on her wishes if he loves her, and her value of money over love that extends to wishing his older ill brother dead. Likewise, the quiet, stoic, obedient Fanny Price finally shows her inner strength, resolve, and independence when she refuses to marry her Stalker with a Crush, yet most of her readers only remember her as the pre-Character Development Extreme Doormat. To say nothing of the shippers who think she should have accepted him. It seems readers still only judge both women based on what they initially appear on the surface before the novel digs deeper, despite the danger of first impressions as a running theme in Jane Austen.
  • Joan Aiken's sequel Return to Mansfield even brings back the Crawfords and gives them a more sympathetic development
  • In all fairness, Austen herself did say that it was entirely possible that Fanny and Henry could have ended up Happily Married, which would have led to Edmund and Mary getting married and being happy together as well. Even so, Austen also said that such an ending only would have happened after time had passed and Henry had reformed himself due to Fanny's influence. At the point the book ended at, Fanny and Edmund would not have been happy with Henry or Mary.
• Likewise, Henry James' Daisy Miller is a story of a girl whose wealthy American peers misjudge her for acting too free-spirited and independent (read: American) in Europe. James was criticizing the aristocratic snobs in the novella who snub Daisy and act ashamed of her. Americans' initial reaction? They hated Daisy and were ashamed of her.
  • James himself once, in an incident G. K. Chesterton talked about in his autobiography, got an object lesson in how Americans didn't actually understand Europe, whether they liked it or not. He was visiting Chesterton, who was vacationing at Rye, and James was saying something complimentary about European refinement and class...and then Hilaire Belloc, the most European person in the world, shows up after having come back from France with no money, unshaven, in workmen's clothes, and shouting for Chesterton to give him bacon and beer. Belloc was in Parliament at the time; it sorta blew James' mind.
• There is an article called Lancelot Lives which is about how to set proper boundaries in relationships with women, not give in to lust and up hold the sanctity of marriage. Because, as we all know, Lancelot is a perfect example of those particular virtues.
• A strategy board game of The Hunger Games was made, which successfully takes the event Collins has spent three books showing as horrible, life destroying, and a sign of just how evil humanity can be, and makes it a fun game for 2-6 players. Some fans are ecstatic.
  • There are rumors of a video game coming out to coincide with the movie adaptation. Let's just point out that a video game about children killing children may not be received well in certain circles and leave it at that.
  • Many fans, like the Capitol crowd, were completely star-struck by the love triangles, intense action sequences and pretty costumes, to the point where wanting to be a tribute became the new "wanting to attend Hogwarts". The final book didn't go over too well with these people.
    • In addition, a lot of fanfiction involves sending OCs to the Hunger Games, and it's treated like a fun game rather than a dehumanizing death-match. Oddly, few of them ever get the real violence; they usually just hang around making OC's, reaping, and maybe chariots/interview scenes.
• Don Quixote offers examples in and out Universe:
  • In-Universe: Alonso Quixano, some time before he had definitely gone nuts and decided to be Don Quixote, but after he devolved from a guy interested in chivalry books to a guy obsessed by them, displayed this (Unexpected) Audience Reactions:
    • Part I, chapter I: Who is Don Quixote Alonso Quixano’s favorite knight? Well, Reinaldos of Montalban. The best part is the reason because he is the favorite:

"… But above all he admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he saw him sallying forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met, and when beyond the seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history says, was entirely of gold."

• • Out-universe, while Cervantes intended for Quixote to be a cutting parody of the romantized reception of the feudal system in his day, Quixote's quest to bring back knightly chivalry has a certain appeal to many hopelessly romantic idealists. Some adaptations of his work, such as The Man Of La Mancha have even opted for this interpretation.
• In the original novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens seems to have considered The Artful Dodger as much a villain and scoundrel as any other character. He's described as physically unattractive, he betrays Oliver and later even drags him back kicking and screaming to Fagin's shop, and like all characters in the novel who engage in criminal acts, he comes to an unfortunate end (being shipped to a prison colony). However, his name is almost synonymous with an Anti-Hero, so much so that he is the Trope Namer for a fully heroic archetype. Perhaps it's due to his portrayal in film and stage adaptations, which often cast attractive actors such as Jack Wild or Elijah Wood in the role. Or perhaps due to the fact that compared to the naive, two-dimensional "protagonist" Oliver, the brash, street-smart Jack Dawkins just seems so much more... interesting. It's even possible that his scene in court, which Dickens apparently intended to depict him as a smarmy, self-absorbed blowhard, actually makes some good points and kind of comes off as really awesome. Plus, when you realize his "punishment" is probably being sent from the filthy, crime- and disease-ridden, violent streets of Victorian London, which Dickens describes in his typical excruciating detail, to the sunny, idyllic Australia, an argument could be made that his "bad end" isn't all that bad, really. In any event, there certainly aren't any baseball teams called the Los Angeles Olivers.
  • It also doesn't help that the Disney animated adaptation turned Dodger's Funny Animal counterpart into that very Anti-Hero - with an Ear Wormy song voiced by Billy Joel, to boot.
• There are some people out there who think that Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles should have ended up with Alec, only because he wants her as a mistress after Angel leaves her. Disregarding the Rape Is Love vibe from this pairing, it is completely out of character for Tess, who never liked him romantically before, and despises him when she is his mistress, only taking the position to support her family.
• The Black Speech from The Lord of the Rings has quite a fanbase for how deliciously evil it sounds. Tolkien, however, designed the Black Speech to be as ugly and hateful as he could possibly design a language. At one point, a fan gave Tolkien a goblet with a copy of the One Ring inscription on it; rather than drink from something bearing such evil words, Tolkien simply used the goblet as an ashtray.
• Cruella de Vil in both The Hundred and One Dalmatians and the Disney adaptations of One Hundred and One Dalmatians is often seen as being symbolic of Pretty in Mink instead of Fur and Loathing.
• The White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling is a case of Misaimed Fandom and Misaimed Hatedom. This point-missing is aggravated by the prints forgetting its "dedication" line. That's like forgetting to supply dynamite with a detonator, because this was "An Address to the United States" published on the heels of the Philippine War. If you don't see the trouble yet, read Mark Twain's articles about it. Or imagine that Joseph Heller with his reputation lived to 2006, and dropped in a big conference with "DRM and laws" in the middle of its order paper... to read his new poem with "Sony Rootkit" in the dedication and "I think Microsoft is a pretty Cool Guy" in the text. Some could take it seriously, more as vicious irony, some like, some not -- but no chance this would not provoke an untold riot then and there. The author of Stalky and Pig should have know what he did was trolleriffic. But just in case it wasn't enough, he also did publically "bequeath" The British Empire's role to the people looking for contrasts with it and still remembering The American Revolution.
• Machiavelli's The Prince is sneered at for setting up the ideal monarch as a tyrant. In reality, The Prince was probably satirical - Machiavelli had been jailed previous to writing it for writing liberal essays that the current monarchs disagreed with and were threatened by.
  • It's also important to note the condition of Italy at the time, which was not so much a country as a bunch of feuding city states. While Machiavelli likely supported more liberal forms of government, it is also likely that in this instance, he considered a strong central ruler to be necessary for Italy to get its shit together and avoid being invaded.
• Mark Twain's note at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn strongly disavowed didactic attempts to explain the story. It's used for exactly that purpose in many literature courses.
• People who use religious texts to justify their personal views, often while evidently not having read them. Let's just leave it at that.
• Louisa May Alcott of Little Women was... not happy with a good part of the feedback she got in regards to her books about the March sisters. She was so specially unhappy with hundreds of girls being so focused on Shipping and asking her when would she write about Jo and Laurie's wedding, that she showed NO mercy in regards to the Ship Sinking in Good Wives. Instead of giving in to fan demand, she had Jo reject Laurie's love declarations at least twice, leave her home, marry her beta-reader Friederich Bhaer instead of Laurie -- and Laurie himself fell for Jo's younger sister Amy and they got Happily Married too.

LMA: "Girls write to ask who the Little Women will marry, as if that were the only aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone."

• The Book of Lord Shang is very keen on war and giving the army something to fight. In support of this, Shang cites The Art of War, in spite of the fact that Sun Tzu said that war should be resorted to as rarely as possible.
• Missionaries trilogy by Lyubov and Yevgeny Lukin. "Missionaries of rocket launchers" being clearly intended as a big He Who Fights Monsters view, Lukin noted that the Islanders civilization got an excess of fan approval. Some readers obviously are as "fed up" as the wannabe heroes. But the main reason is that locals, however messed up with their utterly pointless war and low-industrial waste, are mostly Blood Knight type: enthusiastic, but neither hypocritical about it nor too trigger-happy, and despite paranoia in best Cold War style already setting in, still quite serious about war conventions -- ships about to drift into a demilitarized zone get blown up by their own crew or if already a pyre, sunk by their own assault planes. Compared to both typical "explorers" of The Dung Ages they briefly met and XX century politicians eager to battle for a "good cause" as long as they personally are out of range -- they get to look healthy and refreshing.