Misaimed Fandom/Other Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Misaimed Fandom for historical figures and characters in various works include:

  • Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary. Criticisms of the guy himself aside, there is something hypocritical about using a communist leader's image to sell t-shirts to privileged middle-class kids. (That those privileged middle-class kids like to buy these in the first place seems to suggest that they either don't realize how hypocritical it is, don't care, or some combination of the two.) Their approval would probably fill him with shame. An article from The Other Wiki on Che Guevara merchandise lists a variety of criticisms of it here, from both pro-Che and anti-Che perspectives.
    • Missing the point a little less, there are committed anti-capitalists who nonetheless Did Not Do the Research; many Anarchists and Trotskyists idolize Che despite his having fought to establish a regime both parties decry (as "statist" and "Stalinist", respectively) -- not to mention that he famously had Anarchists and Trotskyists shot.
    • Che was also infamous for massacreing gay people and minorities. So whenever disadvantaged minority groups use his image as a rallying icon... *sigh*
    • Numerous rock musicians have sported the aforementioned tee shirts, and it's common to see people wearing them at concerts. Guevara himself disdained rock music (regarding it as an "Imperialist" form of artistic expression) and banned it from Cuba under the threat of imprisonment. Or worse.
    • For that matter, Che is not his name (it's Ernesto). It's a nickname based on a Verbal Tic, if he'd been Canadian we'd be calling him Eh Guevara.
  • Cracked.com's 8 Historical Symbols That Mean the Opposite of What You Think explores cases of people mistaking real-life symbols for their opposite meanings. Misaimed Fandom is implied by many if not all of these, but especially the Crazy Horse, Guy Fawkes and Che Guevara examples.
  • Pastafarianism originated out of an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education that parodied the idea of teaching Creationism as a science. However, once it gained notoriety, it developed its own Misaimed Fandom as atheists came out of the woodwork, praising the open letter's contents as a Take That to religion in general--which grew even more prevalent when Richard Dawkins considered the letter a valid anti-theological argument. The argument is simply "you can't prove a negative", as in "you can't prove the FSM doesn't exist/didn't create the universe", in response to those who claim that the lack of proof of God's non-existence is evidence for his existence. Russell's Teapot is a more classic example.
    • Ultimately, Pastafarianism's creator subverted this trope: Although he had originally professed that he had nothing against religion, he embraced his atheist fans and catered to their desires. Now that Pastafarianism is a Straw Religion with the message that "Belief Makes You Stupid," it's attracted its fair share of serious followers.
      • And, recently has started recruiting clergymen. For just $20 USD anyone can be legally ordained as a minister in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
    • There are many other parody religions such as the Church of the Subgenius and Discordianism as well.
    • It's not that their major argument was "You can't prove a negative." though it was a small part of it. They were against the "Teach the controversy" idiocy. Then you wouldn't be teaching science and christian creationism, but also pastafarianism, scientology, hindu creationism, the Great Green Arkleseizure, ad nauseum, until nothing ever gets taught.
      • Discordianism [1] actually started as a silly but serious religion to parody other parodies of religion, and there are still "serious" Discordian followers out there. Anyone who says otherwise will rot in Thud.
    • As a funny aside, when Bertrand Russell was indicted for a vast array of offences in absentia for specious reasons, he claims that the university he was denied a position should have the decency to teach the controversy. His essays on the subject were later documented in "Why I am not a Christian", part of which seems to form the inspiration for Brave New World.
  • Mary Sue has a misaimed hatedom and a fandom, believe it or not. One of the most widespread usage of the term "Mary Sue" is to complain about a protagonist or character they don't like, as well as "They are cliche" and a tool to attack the author. [2] The term "Mary Sue" has begun to lose almost all meaning to some people, partly because of term abuse.
    • Common Mary Sue Traits should be mentioned; because many people assume that it's merely because of those traits that make a character a Mary Sue and avert them by making them look as boring as possible and turning them into an Anti-Sue, or immediately dismissing someone as having even one or two of those Common Mary Sue Traits as a Mary Sue, without even acknowledging that those are not the sole determinant of a Mary Sue. Many Litmus exams out there also have a tedndency to pretty much list character traits the person who wrote the test doesn't like and wants to eliminate from fiction by listing it as a Mary Sue trait.
      • Tellingly, the actual Trope Namer from "A Trekkie's Tale" doesn't really have all that many of these traits (although the ones she does have are obvious and parodically over-the-top). Still, you may have noticed that "Mary Sue" is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary name and not something like "Serenity Jupiter Princess Moonlight Kirk". Although Time Marches On; as do names. Mary Sue wasn't as uncommon as a name around the time the story was written as it is now, but the same can be said about names like "Dorothy", "Blanche", "Ethel", etc.
    • And then there are those people who, because of he constant misuse of the term, misunderstand Mary Sue as a slur against strong female characters and attempt to reclaim it. Basically, people should be proud to call their characters Mary Sues.
  • KFC attempted a Battlestar Galactica related promotion, the "Frak Pak Sweepstakes". Considering what the word "frak" is a substitute for, this got a bit of attention from the fanbase, albeit not for the intended reasons.
  • Poe's Law: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."
  • There is an anthropological theory called "Culture of Poverty," that basically says poor people by virtue of their position in society don't have the skills needed to advance in class, nor real opportunities to get them. This has frequently been misconstrued as blaming the victim instead of what it actually is, which is a statement that the poor should be given more educational opportunities and assistance.
  • There are a number of historical/pseudo-historical groups that suffer from this to a greater or lesser degree, often to extreme levels of Fan Dumb. Ninja, Pirates and Druids come to mind, with fictional versions all but taking over the little-known reality in the eyes of popular culture, but almost any group probably fits into the spectrum somewhere.
  • Ugly example: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic propaganda-tract written to discredit anti-royalist movements, depicting them as the gullible puppets of evil Jewish bankers. Frequently quoted by Nazis, both original and neo-, even though its pro-royalist stance is no more compatible with fascism than with any other recent political system.
    • Of course, no discussion of unintended reactions to The Protocols would be complete without mentioning the truly odd way Japan took them. Most Japanese readers tended to be less interested in the bits about how evil the Jews supposedly were and more interested in how much power and influence they had, reasoning that being sympathetic to the Jews would help increase their nation's status.
  • Even though nothing vaguely resembling their ideologies appeared in the mythology, many Neo-Nazis have hijacked Norse paganism as a vehicle for their beliefs, which has also on occasion led to persecution of neopagans out of misunderstanding.
  • A major reason for the "chicks dig assholes" meme on the Internet, at least in those sad few corners where it's still taken seriously.
  • Karl Marx would be banging his head at the usage of "Marxism" as well as "socialism", "communism", and other terms like "fascist", "totalitarianism" and "Nazi" being used interchangably.
    • Marx, in 1883, saw where interpretation of his works were headed even in his own time, and said, "If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist."
      • The comment is actually ironic, referring to a French group that had appropriated Marx's name called the Marxiste. That's why the original quote was in French despite the fact that Marx was German and wrote primarily in German, English and Greek. Later when the Marxiste were forgotten (and the word came to refer to Marxists in general) conservative commentators started reading it as a catch-all dismissal of Marxists or Marxism.
  • The website MyFootballClub.co.uk was aimed at allowing regular football fans to collectively purchase and run a professional football (soccer) club (Ebbsfleet Utd). The slogan was "Own The Club, Pick The Team", however the seeming majority only signed up for the social aspects (and more minor aspects such as choosing the colour of the shirts), and even actively voted against the "pick the team" aspect, resulting in most of the original members becoming disgruntled and abandoning the project at an early stage. The result? By the end of the first full season in charge, the entire first team had to be sold to cover the shortfall in membership fees. By the end of the second season in charge the club's finances were in ruins, members were leaving in their droves, and the club were relegated down to a local, part-time league.
  • One of the Labour Party's attempts to persuade the British people that Tory leader David Cameron wasn't a good choice in the 2010 general election was to depict him as Gene Hunt, with a slogan saying he'd pull Britain back to the '80s. Conservatives loved the poster depicting their leader as a popular, political correctness-hating Memetic Badass, congratulated Labour and promptly made their own version.
  • Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" (no, it wasn't Darwin who said it) seemed to miss the point of Darwin's theories. Herbert Spencer rejoiced when Darwin came up with his theory of natural selection, because he took it to mean that rich people were simply "the fittest" and there is nothing wrong with the oppression of the poor since their plight shows that they are obviously just not fit enough. Thank goodness his attempts to stuff Darwin's theories into sociological theory were unsuccessful.
  • Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Disciple" describes how this happens to religious teachings as soon as the original teacher is gone.
  • Quality control on some art sites quickly devolves into this, especially when it stops being "This isn't that good, I won't take it" to "I don't like the artist, so I won't accept this".
  • Erwin Schrodinger concocted his "Schrodinger's Cat" thought-experiment in 1935, purely to hang a lampshade on the failings of the 'Copenhagen interpretation' version of quantum mechanics. Physicists who advocate this paradigm tend to portray his model as a serious metaphor for quantum states, rather than a critique of how the Copenhagen interpretation was inconsistent with, and irrelevant to, classical physics.
    • Ironically, in many ways he was proven to be right. Quantum Physics is so alien to our thinking that attempting to refute it by pointing out how absurd it is merely offers a fair example. While the example is not literally true, it provides a reasonable example for the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics being what they are, though, any understanding not rooted solely in mathematics is going to be limited by the human mind.
  • Fred Hoyle, a cosmologist who favored a "steady state" theory of the universe, coined the term "Big Bang" to ridicule that idea. He wound up giving it a catchy, easy to remember name that is now learned by every child in English-speaking nations.
  • Thomas Edison invested in development of the electric chair as an execution device to try and show everybody the dangers of alternating current (the current model used by his rival Westinghouse) and discourage its use. It was supposed to be "an awful spectacle" as a witness to its first use famously remarked, but a few years later it had became standard in much of the United States. Of course, when the people you use it on are murderers and rapists...
  • Deadpan Snarker / Accentuate the Negative is often treated as an attractive mentality. Some people cite "smart" snarky characters such as Daria and Malcolm as proof that the trait is a sign of wit and intelligence. This ignores, of course, that snide and sarcastic behavior rarely comes across as amusing outside of the fantasy world of entertainment (or internet, where the GIFT is in effect). If you Accentuate the Negative in real life as much as most fictional snarkers, most people will want to stay the hell away from you because you will seem completely unable to enjoy anything.
    • Depends when and where you're using it. Deadpan Snarkery can be very endearing to many people, as it shows that you have a sharp wit and good sense of humor. So it depends on the situation.
    • It's best to go heavier on the deadpan and lighter on the snark; even so-so material can be funny if it can be delivered with a straight face, but too much acerbic snarkiness just makes one look like a smug asshole.
    • Likewise, people try to replicate a couple characters who happen to be jerks such as House. Never mind that in the case of House, you would not want to work with him and you would not want to work for him, either. And in the case of internet critics like The Angry Video Game Nerd, The Nostalgia Critic or The Nostalgia Chick, they are characters that are intended to be pathetic masochists.
      • Video game critics like Yahtzee and the ones mentioned above usually slam video games of their flaws to the extreme because that is a part of their character. Somehow, many people take nearly everything that is said at face value and use the nearly cartoonish criticisms as the basis on why no one should play a certain game. Just take a look at many user-created video game reviews and you're bound to find a handful of people that can't seem to say at least one positive thing about the game they are slamming.
    • Similar to the deadpan snarkery, criticism and critiquing in general seems to have taken a direction at jerkassery. The rise of harsh critics that judge the skill of others like Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsey have given people the wrong idea on how to critique others. The shows with the harsh critics are used on people who think they are talented when they are actually horrible and are ripped apart by the harsh judges. The same critics can also be seen giving advice to people who have potential and can be pretty heartwarming at times. However, nearly everyone believes that slamming someone's work to pieces without saying anything positive or even offering advice on how to improve is the way to get people to improve when it would actually either get the person to ignore them or completely give up on what they were working on because they feel no one actually likes what they did.
  • There are a lot of people who keep adding Justifying Edits to the Rape Is Ok When It Is Female On Male page to explain why a particular incident isn't "really" rape or shouldn't count.
  • Straw Man Has a Point is filled with examples where someone merely disagreed with the series protagonists, and the troper assumed that the writers are portraying the hero as 100% correct, all the time. For example, Doctor Who's Ninth Doctor did some morally dubious things, such as the climax of Dalek. Yet when his successor, Ten, does similar things, even when they're specifically shown to have terrible consequences down the line, the people who disagreed with him are "obviously" supposed to be strawmen.
  • Better Than It Sounds has lots of examples that actually sound pretty cool.
  • Similarly, there are a few people who like to claim any vague similarity to something else is Plagiarism, usually in regards to a work they dislike.
  • Anime is now forever tainted in eyes of many of the survivors (and their direct descendants) of Japanese atrocities in WWII in the Philippines. Why? Because anime is popular in the Philippines and has caused an upsurge in Japanophilia. Problem is, some of these self-declared Japanophiles go too much to one extreme and downplay Japanese atrocities in WWII as exaggerations or fabrications by Americans, and sometimes say that it would've been great that Imperial Japan had won since the Philippines would have been part of it. Understandably this horrifies and enrages the aforementioned survivors, as well as fans who aren't that extreme and don't want to get lumped in with said Misaimed Fandom.
    • What makes these freaks especially stupid is that anime as we know it wouldn't exist without the sweeping cultural changes wrought by Japan's defeat. In the quintessential Alternate History where the Axis wins, Osamu Tezuka spent his life as a medic in a field hospital & guys like Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Tomino were probably drafted into the military and promptly shot dead by native resistance fighters in some forsaken bamboo jungle.
  • There is a branch of Social Darwinism based off ideas in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. When he found out about it he added a forward to later editions specifically refuting it.
  • According to the author of Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, Ensemble Darkhorse Edfred is supposed to be seen as a Jerkass who gets in Ronan's way, but many readers like him for being the only one to stand up to the Jerk Sue hero.
  • Nietzsche Wannabes.
  • After Steve Irwin died, a couple of fanatics began brutally killing innocent stingrays to "avenge" his death. This is completely the opposite of what Irwin would have wanted. He would have said that the stingray that killed him was merely scared and was defending itself, and that we need to be protecting these animals, not killing them off.
  • Purging (inducing vomiting) started out as an emergency measure to only be used if one swallows something that is either poisonous or they are allergic to, but bulimics have used it to expel anything they eat.
  • A lot of dictatorships critical of the U.S. attract supporters from all over the world, as long as they're willing to overlook the odd genocide or two.
    • It goes both ways: some people support various pro-Western dictators. Granted, it isn't so common today, but was much more so during the Cold War.
    • A lot of support for both pro-and-anti-American dictatorships comes with heavy doses of Enemy Mine.
  • Barry Goldwater, while often hailed today as a leader of modern conservatism, was actually quite liberal in many regards, especially on social issues. His ideology was less conservative and more libertarian, however many of his views seemed quite extreme back in the 1960s when he was running for President of the United States. He said numerous things that seemed too out of the mainstream, and this ultimately ended in his landslide defeat to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. However, later in life when the Ronald Reagan conservatives and religious fundamentalists dominated the Republican Party and treated Goldwater as a hero to the right-wing, Goldwater stated that today's Republican Party is not the same as it was in the 60s and he was ashamed to be part of such an extreme political party.
    • Several of Goldwater's lesser-known political positions are that he approved of gays in the military, wanted to legalize medical marijuana, and was in favor of abortion.
    • Of particular note in this regard is that in her youth, Hillary Clinton was a 'Goldwater Girl'.
  • Some people say something to the effect of "Yeah, Benito Mussolini did a lot of bad things, but he also made the trains run on time." (They actually didn't.)
  • Yes, it's still rape if the victim gets off. Really, it's sad this has to be here.
  • Around this wiki. Sorry fans, but a character being in the way of your preferred couple only makes them a Scrappy in your head. Actual scrappies need general fan consensus in order to earn that moniker.
  • The Nazis and their admiration for Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. Frederick the Great was a massive Francophile who hated the German language while Bismarck would have been horrified at the Nazis insanely belligerent policy and Hitler a lowborn demagogue.
  • The "Nintendo Seal of Quality". There have been people saying that Nintendo should bring it back...despite that you can name a hundred So Bad It's Horrible games that bear this seal of quality. It never meant "Good" game, it meant "Not a ripoff cartridge". It's also sad that this has to be here, despite how many games reviewed by internet critics like the Irate Gamer and Angry Video Game Nerd that have the seal in the corner.
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  1. ↑ fnord
  2. ↑ Yeah, some people don't take criticisms of mary sues too seriously, but one really shouldn't neglect how many people throw the term around merely as Flame Bait
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