Misaimed Fandom/Web Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Misaimed Fandoms for characters in Web Comics include:

  1. It's minus, so there is nothing "impossible" here. She will make a home-run with the meteor.
  2. Knowing her, she probably summoned it in the first place.
  • Richard, the undead warlock of Looking for Group, does nothing so much as play jump rope with the line. He has an entire summer home in audacity. About the only time we ever see him is when he's killing stuff for the hell of it or making kinda Vincenty Price-y jokes. And "stuff" in this context means, well, you name it. Women, children, innocent bystanders, orphanages, whatever. It was well into the story before there was even a hint that he had any purpose or role other than as super-dark comic relief, or any redeeming qualities at all. Go on and guess which character seems to be by far the fandom favorite. Saying things like "I don't like to see evil characters get away with the things Richard gets away with" on the forums isn't quite going to get anyone flamed, but expect plenty of people to leap to defense of their favorite comic mass murderer. There are both Foe Yay and heroics in the strip revolving around Richard, especially in the more recent installments of the comic, so it's unclear if the character has a genuinely misguided fandom, or if he is being evolved in the comic progression, or if one has led to the other or vice-versa.
  • It's pretty much impossible to claim Misaimed Fandom in Order of the Stick without getting hit with massive amounts of Internet Backdraft, though the contradictory positions means that someone must have the wrong end of the ten-foot pole. But Word of God eventually stepped in to confirm the "Belkar is Chaotic Good" claim as nonsense. He's Chaotic Evil, and not exactly subtle about it either.
    • And just confirmed Yes, killing off a quarter of an entire race is evil, even if most of them are also evil. Not that it's stopped people arguing about it.
    • There's also the case of Miko Miyazaki who was a parody of a badly roleplayed Paladin (in contrast to more balanced characters like Hinjo, O-Chul and Lien) yet developed a rather bizarre following despite her overwhelmingly unlikeable nature. Time seems to have faded most of it away, though there are still occasional outbreaks on the official forums.
    • Girard Draketooth, who somehow gained a reputation as a Properly Paranoid Magnificent Bastard by his cunning plan of hurling inaccurate accusations of treachery at a dead man and ineffectively trying to blow up a group of people who showed up to help him. Put it down to Cool People Rebel Against Authority.
    • This was both Lampshaded and Discussed in this strip, when favorite fanbase villain Thog shows up as a gladiator, and we are told that "No matter how many people he kills, the audience thinks he's lovable.
  • NewRem Comics entire fanbase is misaimed. According to Word of God, the main character is intended to be a deconstruction of an RPG Heroine's life after there's nothing left to save, not a cutesy nerd rage comic.
    • It would probably help if the author gave any hint of this at all in the strip.
  • Gright the Suicide Doll in Far Out There was supposed to be offensive, unsettling, and an attack on the sort of people who would buy such things. Much to the author's horror, readers have demanded actual Gright merchandise ever since.
  • Collar 6: Recently, some fans have suggested that Buttefly may simply be an "antagonist" and not a "villain." This comes with the claim that her torturing Trina for information on Sixx was consensual BDSM.
  • Trollface. The meme originated from a comic lampooning Internet trolls, but the face was so awesome that the very same trolls had no problem making it the most recognizable icon of "the lulz" this side of Awesome itself.
  • One of the major themes in Homestuck is that everything is predestined, and that going against what's meant to happen will only result in disaster. It's been established in the comic that the kids the story follows are the only ones who will play Sburb and survive - any of the other kids who got the game will be doomed to failure when the meteors come because they aren't the ones who are supposed to play. And yet, fanfics and roleplay that take place in a Sburb session with entirely new human or troll kids are hugely popular. At least some of them make up a new species for the players to be first, but the vast majority of them don't.
    • Zig Zagged in canon; Hussie has left open the idea that other human sessions escaped, but all of them are also doomed for failure, even showing a brief snippet of a session with a friend of Dad's. No other troll session exists though.
    • Also, many fans take whatever Andrew Hussie says outside of the comic, such as on the forums or his Formspring page, as Word of God that is unarguably canon. Problem is, Andrew is a Teasing Creator and many of the things he writes about his comic outside of the actual comic are intended as jokes.
    • Troll Romance was supposed to be comically exaggerated. It and the related characters ended up breaking the comic out into mainstream awareness. Similarly, Andrew chose to make the main characters 13-year-olds so that romance wouldn't come into play. Guess what comic has one of the largest shipping fanbases on the Internet?
  • In Ansem Retort, Axel proposing to Aerith at the end of season 4 was meant to purely be a Take That towards how most shows tend to end a season with a major Shocking Swerve, but many readers consider it to be a genuine Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
  • The famous Hark! A Vagrant strip about Mr Darcy was originally intended to parody how ridiculously fangirlish women still get about Mr Darcy, because most of the tropes that made him sexy to the audience of that day no longer apply in modern society and because no-one could possibly live up to the Memetic Sex God Mr Darcy has become in the popular imagination over the years. However, people all over the internet just edit the comic with their fandom's Memetic Sex God, totally unironically.
  • Misfile is a deconstruction on Gender Bender stories, the nightmare of waking up as a girl being played straight, along with the issues that transgender people go through. However, in the forums there are always people who can't understand why Ash doesn't just conform to the Second Law of Gender Bending.

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