Strawman Has a Point/Literature

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Examples of Strawman Has a Point in Literature include:

• The Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series is full of this. Richard (the avatar of the author's ex-husband) frequently rants against the murder, rape, hypocrisy, greed, and general bad behavior of the Mary Sue protagonist, allegedly to show what a self-hating mess he is. The author is apparently unaware that he's the only one who makes any kind of logical, intelligent points about the heroine — and she doesn't even dispute the things he says.
• In the second Death World book (the Harry Harrison series), a major character exists solely so the Author Avatar (and Mary Sue) can explain to him the virtues of moral relativism. Only problem is, while the character is a dog-kicking Designated Villain, the arguments he makes against relativism aren't really shot down, just ignored in favor of the main character being made to look much cooler than him.
• The Pale Woman in the Realm of the Elderlings novel Fool's Fate actually has a very good point: reviving an apex predator with the capacity to wipe out humanity and no real reason not to is a pretty darned stupid idea. It is primarily the political implications that drive Fitz to oppose her, though.
• Left Behind:
  • This is a huge, huge problem with the series of books, as noted in the Slacktivist blog deconstructing it. The main heroes are such Jerk Sues that many of the people with whom they argue come off looking much better by comparison. For example, in the first chapter, a drunk Texan wakes up and sees the carnage wrought by the Rapture (plane crashes, etc). He is mocked as a silly drunk by the narrators, but he is the only one to express any sort of horror at the proceedings. In the next book, we are clearly supposed to cheer for the alleged hero as he is insubordinate to his boss - whose main crime seems to be being a woman who doesn't fawn over him and expects him to do his job.
  • Arguably, the "heroes" are supposed to be callous to the suffering at this point, as they haven't been "saved" and are still unrepentant sinners. The problem is, even after they are saved and supposedly become model Christians, they are still obnoxious jackasses who consider others' suffering an inconvenience. The only notes of genuine regret or contrition come from the supposedly un-saved.
  • The overall premise of the entire series is this. God is set up as the good guy and Nicolae Carpathia (the antichrist) is the bad guy. Although Carpathia is definitely a murderous tyrant, his actions pale in comparison to the billions actively killed by God.
• In the Fate of the Jedi series, Galactic Alliance Chief of State Natasi Daala enacts various policies to reign in what she see as the unchecked power that the Jedi have within the Galactic Alliance. Coming off a major galactic civil war started by a corrupted Jedi who enacted a coup and seized control of the Alliance, she is not entirely without precedent or reason to be concerned over potentially uncontrolled actions by Force Users. These policies grow excessively draconian and begin to cost her public opinion due to various publicised incidents. However, instead of using the mounting public pressure and political scandals resulting from her actions to legally reign in Daala's excesses (as had already proved effective in overturning the siege of the Jedi Temple and eliminating the Court of Jedi Affairs), the Jedi embark on a coup to remove her from power that involves taking hostages, attacking government facilities, killing the appointed acting Grandmaster of the Jedi Kenth Hamner, and removing Daala from power to install Hamner's killer as part of an acting Triumvirate over the Alliance.
• The Turner Diaries: a strawman proclaims the "heroes" of the book as "depraved, racist criminals." He's supposed to be a strawman, yet this is a 100% accurate description of the "heroic" white supremacist Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group known as the Order.
• The Pro and Contra chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, including its influential Grand Inquisitor story, gives us Ivan's nihilistic message and a rejection of God, which is a message Dostoyevski wanted to ultimately reject. The following parts involving Alyosha and Father Zosima provide sort of a counterpoint, a defense of God and existence. However, Ivan's accusation has a greater dramatic impact and is far more memorable.
• The Saga of Seven Suns has a very odd case of this, not with the strawmen having a point, but the good guys (Theroc and roamers) not having one. Like, the roamers complaining about the Hansa not lending assistance to Theroc after just having denied any access to starship fuel. Or the roamers complaining that the Hansa killed a rogue roamer who was blowing up random Hansa ships. Or the roamers complaining that a rogue hansa blew up a roamer vessel that was illegally selling stuff to Hansa colonies, and then the roamers procede to cut off the hansa from starship fuel, so that most of humanity would starve to death, and the other half would get blown up by aliens. Or the roamers... Let's just leave it at the fact that the roamers are somehow good guys, while the hansa are the villains.
• The protagonist of Cryptonomicon gets in an argument with some academics who are clearly meant to come off as hopelessly deluded, politically correct, stuck-up elitists whose work has no basis in reality and is just about furthering trendy bullshit as a career. How? By pointing out, however exaggeratedly, that a white male from a middle-class background is more likely to end up in engineering than someone less privileged. Note that they don't say this is the protagonist's personal fault, just that the system he's in is often unfair. He responds by getting defensive and trying to claim he himself is oppressed by their "attack", using the exact same sort of language. (They're his wife's friends, he's sick of them, and it's hinted he's not sincere, just doing it out of sheer cussedness.)
• In the fourth Maximum Ride novel, Max is furious that, after she and the Flock come to the government's attention, they would dare to try to put them in a boarding school. A few of their concerns—being told they would be studied to a certain extent, etc—were valid, given their history. Several others not so much, especially when Max basically tells them "we've had it harder than you and we know better". It's kind of difficult to argue that they are properly prepared to move to civilian life when they decide to dive-bomb the Pentagon for amusement and then are surprised that there's retaliation.
• Twilight:
  • In the novel New Moon, Bella is annoyed that Jessica won't talk to her, and thinks that Jessica is being petty and evil. This is after Bella has ignored everyone for four months, used Jessica to get Charlie off her back, ditched her shortly into the movie to pine over Edward, and then nearly frightened Jessica to death by walking up to a very dangerous-looking biker in a bad part of town that Jessica clearly wanted to avoid, all because Bella thought it may be the same one that Edward rescued her from before.
  • In Breaking Dawn, Leah calls Bella out on some of her more selfish actions in trying to manipulate and keep Jacob with her despite knowing full well how much it hurts Jacob to be around her knowing that she's chosen to die and become an undead monstrosity with Edward over a life with him. Even Bella admits that she's being selfish, but chooses to keep doing it anyway. Everyone else gets angry at Leah for upsetting Bella, including the guy Leah was trying to stand up for. And any point Leah made is completely forgotten.
• On a far more highbrow and (for lack of a better word) sensible level, Friedrich Nietzsche had this reaction to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov: Raskolnikov at first believes himself to be an Ubermensch, but is wracked by guilt and eventually gets his redemption through a religious (specifically Orthodox Christian) experience. Nietzsche regarded the religious-redemption bit as bull and disdained Raskolnikov's feelings of guilt, but agreed with the unreformed Raskolnikov's Ubermenschian perspective.
• An in-universe example appears in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the form of Emmanuel Goldstein, a strawman politician invented by the ruling party in order to draw out dissidents. Orwell uses Goldstein in order to set out his own views of totalitarian societies; in the book he is entirely correct, but the authorities do not even try to suppress his message. Instead, they attempt to condition the population into being unable to comprehend objective reality.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, Galbatorix can be seen as this. While later books established him as being thoroughly evil and tyrannical, his depiction in early books left him looking pretty good for many readers. His rise to power (in which he won humanity's superiority over the elves and killed the all-powerful dragon riders) is portrayed as a Moral Event Horizon, and he wants to stomp out the urgals, a warlike species whose rite of passage is to find something, anything, and kill it. He's done plenty of unsavoury things and isn't to be praised, but he's made humanity safe and superior, and even his enemies acknowledge that his batshit insanity doesn't touch most of his subjects. And he is the established power, with a clear-cut law, as opposed to the Varden, who will gladly accept you into their group provided you A.) follow your flawed and suicidal orders to the letter, and B.) be sure to always shower praise on Eragon, the elves, and your visionary leader, Nasuda. In the end it isn't so much that the Strawman Has A Point, but that the other side has even less of a point.
• Harry Potter:
  • When Dolores Umbridge became High Inquisitor of Hogwarts and fires the Divination Instructor, Prof. Trelawney, for failing to make a prediction on cue, it is supposed to be a Kick the Dog moment; except that Trelawney is a de facto Phony Psychic: she relies primarily on the credibility of descending from an actual renowned seer while making fake/vague predictions. The Divination class itself is portrayed as an "Easy A" class, with Harry & Ron making up stories as their "predictions", as opposed to whatever "genuine" methods Trelawney uses for divining the future. In the next book, it's even revealed that Dumbledore was planning to discontinue Divination when Trelawney applied for the teaching post; he hired her only because during her interview she fell into a trance and made the prophecy of The Chosen One who could defeat Voldemort.
    • The scene (and series overall) seems to indicate that Umbridge was not necessarily wrong for ending the Divinations class, but for the heartless, callous, and humiliating way she did it. If Dumbledore had ever decided to get rid of Divinations again, he probably would have found some other posting for Trelawney, since as she said Hogwarts was her home and she had nowhere else to go. Umbridge really doesn't give a frog's eyelash where Trelawney goes or what happens to her, which is her real crime, not the closure of Divinations class.
  • When Cho Chang tries to speak up on behalf of her friend Marietta after Marietta told on the DA and got Hermione's jinx of "SNEAK" pimpled across her face for it, she points out that Marietta's mum works at the Ministry and that it's been really difficult for her. Harry furiously replies, "Ron's dad works for the Ministry too! And in case you hadn't noticed, he hasn't got 'sneak' written across his face!" It doesn't take a lot of Fridge Logic to realize just how feeble Harry's retort is. Sure, Ron's dad works at the Ministry, but Ron's dad is also Dumbledore's Man Through and Through, a person who when forced to choose between believing Dumbledore or the Ministry when it was impossible to choose both, chose Dumbledore. Marietta's mum made the opposite choice. If Marietta had a good relationship with her mother, then yes, it would've been really difficult for Marietta in ways that it never was for Ron (and the very fact that Marietta didn't tell on them until 6 months after the DA was formed indicates the decision didn't come easily to her). Furthermore, Ron knew about the jinx, while Marietta didn't. Which leads us to...
    • Cho also says that the jinx was a "really horrible trick" of Hermione's and she should've told the DA that the list they all signed was jinxed. Harry interrupts by telling Cho it was a "brilliant" idea. And again, Cho's point is stronger than Harry's. Hermione tricked not just Marietta, but the entire DA into signing a jinxed list without telling them beforehand that it was jinxed, which is ethically questionable at best, and well, really horrible at worst. And telling the DA about the jinx afterwards would've been the only way the jinx would've actually prevented anyone in the DA from talking in the first place, making the idea somewhat less than brilliant. And Cho's whole argument becomes much stronger at the start of the next book when it's revealed that Marietta's hex is apparently permanent and Hermione has potentially disfigured her for life.
  • In general, the portrayal of Cho Chang in the fifth book is an example of this. She's made to seem ridiculous for the fact that she can't get over Cedric and seems to be dating Harry purely because of his connection to him, but when you consider that many people's first break-up is enough to send them into emotion turmoil for a while, how else do you expect a sixteen-year-old girl to react to her boyfriend dying? It's especially true given that the wizarding world appears to be one in which There Are No Therapists.
  • During Chamber of Secrets, caretaker Argus Filch scolds the protagonist fiercely for not cleaning his shoes before entering the castle, leaving the floor splattered with mud and grime. While Harry tries to defend himself with a pathetic "it's just a little mud!", Filch makes the very valid point that for him, it means two hours of cleaning. Throughout the book, Filch is meant to be seen as a humorless, cruel man, but this rings pretty hollow when you realize that not only is he the one cleaning after the entire school's wacky antics, he's also the sole resident who cannot use magic.
  • Dolores Umbridge is rather a poster child for this trope. For instance, her pronouncement “progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged.” Anybody who has worked in the corporate world and suffered through a succession of new bosses with big egos who want to change everything just so they can leave their mark on the company will be nodding sympathetically with this statement. Unfortunately, Dolores was a sadistic administrator spouting reasonable-sounding slogans while pushing her own agendas. Hence, the straw.
• Isabel Allende's House Of The Spirits, arguably, provides an example of this trope. Esteban Trueba's feudalistic views on his workers are unacceptable by today's standards. Still, it would indeed be quite idealistic (if not downright unreasonable) to believe that barely literate people are fully qualified to participate in political life.

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