Straw Character: Difference between revisions

** It's also important to remember that [[Values Dissonance|throughout most of the 1960s, before the antiwar mindset truly entered the liberal mainstream]], it was possible to be a liberal ''and'' a hawk (as long as war advanced a liberal agenda). In fact, at many times in the past the ''conservatives'' were the ones who were antiwar.

** In the [[Justice League Unlimited|JLU]] episode ''Hawk and Dove'', they were portrayed once again as Straw Conservative and Liberal respectively, and while Hawk was once again portrayed as an over-aggressive brute vs Dove's pacifist outlook, though Hawk's behavior was tempered by his stated need to protect his brother, whom he saw as "weak".

* The Daily Planet columnist Dirk Armstrong in ''[[Superman]]'' was created as a strawman conservative, though some later writers gave him more depth and sympathetic qualities, such as having to raise a blind teenage daughter on his own. His strawman status should have been obvious, given his physical resemblance to [[Rush Limbaugh]]. While he is portrayed initially as a Superman fan (for being tough on crime), he is the first to turn on Superman after he loses control of his powers and becomes an energy being... though [[Dork Age|in hindsight]], he might have been the [[Only Sane Man]] on this subject! Thankfully, soon after that storyline ended, he was [[Put on a Bus]] and has not been seen since.

** Some writers that handled the character seemed to think that any conservative leaning, ''at all'', constituted being a whacko extremist. Meaning that when Armstrong vowed to devote his column to making sure a mayor with a poor gun rights record wasn't elected (at least until the election), it slammed straight into [[Straw Man Has a Point]] territory so hard that if you weren't aware of the character's status as a strawman whipping-boy, you'd have thought they ''meant'' him to be right. For extra points, he said this while at a costume party and dressed as Lincoln... the mayor was dressed as ''Caesar.''

* Any politician who appears in ''[[The Authority]]'' will be depicted as corrupt, greedy and too dumb to live. They also will be all Strawman Conservatives - and the more vocally they are opposed to the titular group of superpowered sociopaths, the more Straw they get.

* Silver Age comics had some Straw Man Communists, especially in [[Iron Man]] with guys like Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo. These guys come across as cartoonish caricatures of a what a communist is supposed to be rather then part of any criticism that has any depth. Your average communist villain in the Silver age was about as deep as a [[Captain Planet]] villain. Since the focus was on their ideology rather then their characters they have remained [[Flat Character]] types and kinda pointless after the Berlin Wall fell. The focus wasn't on their ideology (which was hardly even mentioned), the focus was on providing an [[Acceptable Targets|acceptable target]] for [[Iron Man]] to beat up. The writers were too lazy to think up a real motivation for enemies to attack, so they decided that the [[Monster of the Week]] attacked the hero because they were Communists, and [[Exclusively Evil|that's what Communists do]]. Communists were that era's equivalent to [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazis]]. Considering the Cold War nearly went multiple times in real life early in Iron Man's comic book career, its not much of a stretch to conceive of an aggressive soviet enemy responding to Tony's inadvertent escalation of the arms race. That said, it was probably still overused but it was more about the status of the relationship between the two nations and less about actual ideologies.

== Film ==