Straw Loser: Difference between revisions

== Anime ==

* ''[[Clannad]]'' - Tomoya has his eternal buttmonkey Sunohara hanging off him -- a foil whose job it is to suck.

* Subverted in Reinouryokusha Odagiri Kyouko no Uso when the designated [[Straw Loser]] (a skeptic whose life's work is to debunk the alleged "psychic powers" of the main character), is helped by the main character, into showing the audience that he treasures his wife's life more than proving that his opponent is a fraud.

** Peter Pettigrew in, who is consistently portrayed in flashback as being a wimpy weasel who ''wets himself'' in the presence of his much cooler friends.

** Aunt Petunia is revealed, retroactively to be a [[Straw Loser]], and is only jealously lashing out at Harry because she didn't get to go to wizarding school. It's worse than that-Lily and Petunia's parents were so excited that their daughter was a witch, that Petunia became convinced that she had become [[The Unfavorite]] for no better reason than that fate had simply seen fit to choose the wrong sister. So she takes revenge on her sister for having a gift that caught their parents' eye, partly by abusing Harry, but especially by spoiling Dudley before Harry's eyes, so that Lily, in some way, can know what it's like to be the reviled child.

* Way back in 1632, natural philosopher Galileo Galilei was commissioned to write a book that would get the Catholic Church out of looking like it blindly supported Aristotle's dogma in a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that he was in serious error. He was told to make the book balanced, so he included a character who would represent all the old beliefs ... a ridiculous straw character based on his most extreme enemies. In a bizarre self-inflicted [[Stealth Insult]], Pope Urban VIII became convinced that the [[Straw Loser]] represented ''him'' and had Galileo tried by the Inquisition. Equally humorously, the trial required the Church to actually declare the Copernican system heretical - previously the Church was tied to it mostly by its conscious philosophical debt to Aristotle. Galileo, ironically, became a better writer while under house arrest - Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences took away the [[Straw Loser]] status of the character while still letting him be critical of Galileo's work.

* In ''[[The Talmud]]'', this plays out with the rival schools of the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The latter basically exists to be always wrong- whatever Jewish practice is, it will be the one endorsed by Hillel, and Shammai will take a position that wasn't adopted. Given this and the above example, it's probably fair to say that philosophical dialogues tend to attract this trope.

'''Blackadder:''' Personally, however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me I'm best. }}

* In an episode of [[The Office]], [[Discussed Trope|the employees find]] [[Her Codename Was Mary Sue|a screenplay]] by Michael Scott where he has an idealized version of himself named Agent Michael Scarn, whose sidekick Samuel (Dwight) "is this complete idiot causing the downfall of the United States."