Informed Wrongness

Showing when someone is wrong can be a powerful tool for an author. It can characterize the villainous or misguided, it can lead to An Aesop, and it is vital for strawmen in Author Tracts. It's even easier for an author to just tell us that someone is wrong rather than go through all those boring complicated fact things. Unfortunately, this often means that when you think about it, they aren't wrong at all. The fact that we're supposed to be dismissing their opinions is because the writers are telling us to more than any actual logic.

Can be a center point in The War On Straw. See Straw Man Has a Point for this trope when used with the strawman archetype. See The Complainer Is Always Wrong for one situation where this often comes up.

Compare And That's Terrible in which characters are clearly shown to be villainous, but this detail is outright explained, anyway. Contrast Never My Fault, when the character responsible completely deflects blame onto someone else.

If taken to the extreme, these characters can become the Designated Villain who will commit a Designated Evil.

Examples of Informed Wrongness include:

Anime and Manga

  • In the Pokémon anime episode "Challenge of the Samurai", Ash Ketchum spends much of the episode being berated by the titular character for not finishing what he started (not stopping a Weedle from escaping, thus letting it summon a swarm of Beedrill). However, the only reason the Weedle escaped was because the Samurai surprised him as he was about to capture it, because he didn't have the courtesy to wait until Ash was done catching it. Yet Ash is meant to accept responsibility for what went wrong, even though nothing was his fault, and even though he defeats the Samurai, he's still short one Weedle which would someday evolve into a Beedrill.
    • As a more general example, Team Rocket is rightfully lambasted for trying to steal Pokemon that already belong to trainers... but they're also reacted to in exactly the same way when they attempt to catch wild Pokemon, the same thing the protagonists are (supposed to be) doing. The series seems to imply that their methods are somehow in the wrong when catching wild Pokemon, and that the only "fair" way to catch a wild Pokemon is to have one of your own beat it up first.
  • This is inflicted, to an extent, upon Lelouch, late in Code Geass, when he is betrayed by the Black Knights on accusation of using them as pawns and abandoning them, giving no opportunity to defend himself, even though they aren't really any better at what they preach, not to mention the company they end up siding with two of the enemies, one of them Schneizel, the most notorious of the royal children, who takes liberties with the evidence he presents, and the Britannian spy who watched over Lelouch, who happens to have been secretly involved romantically with Ohgi. And yet this is presented as Laser-Guided Karma for Lelouch, and that his next act, the Zero Requiem, is argued by the narrative as atonement for everything he had done. Logically however, his rebellion had resulted in much less in the way of death and destruction, and had led to the formation of a legitimate international front to fight Britannia for the liberation of all numbered areas. By now though, he had crossed the Despair Event Horizon having lost the Black Knights, and apparently Nunnally, and was looking for an excuse to die. Beyond all this, there were several characters who were much more at fault, if not downright responsible for his problems, who lived on at the end instead.
  • In Working!!, Souta is repeatedly made the bad guy for complaining when Inami punches him. Except, you know, she's punching him, with super-strength, and whenever she gets close, for no reason other than her illness. To be fair, he does get kinda rude sometimes, but it's hard not to sympathize with his plight.

Comic Books

Tony: I realized that in this crazy business we're in, there's no one I'd miss more than you.
—Captain America v1 #401
  • Another Marvel example. Skarr, Son Of The Hulk, was hit with this really hard throughout his entire miniseries. The narration and tone constantly informed us that he was bordering on being a Complete Monster if he wasn't already one. And while he certainly did a few morally dubious things in his quest to stop the slavers and slaughterers rampaging across the planet, they were phrased in such overblown ways to make them seem worse than they were that it just seemed melodramatic (with one of his "worst" offenses being a bluff of Pay Evil Unto Evil). This culminated in Skarr being wrong for not wanting Galactus to eat his planet because, apparently, Galactus eating the planet was for the greater good... keep in mind, Earth superheroes regularly bluff Galactus with destroying the entire universe to make him leave Earth alone, which means he just goes off and eats someone else's planet.

Fan Works

  • Not surprisingly, this trope tends to find a lot of use in fan fiction, especially when people invoke Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater to change the social dynamics of a story's cast to fit their own story. This is Egregious when done in a series with a lot of Comedic Sociopathy (such as Ranma ½) where the entire cast is playing a gigantic game of catch with a multitude of Idiot Balls, Distress Balls, Hero Balls, and Villain Balls. In such stories, it doesn't matter how much attempted murder and bastardry have happened in the past, the new instance is suddenly the breaking point for which everyone will view the perpetrator as a Complete Monster.
  • In My Immortal, being a "prep" or a "poser", rather than a "goff", is bad because... the story says so!

Film

  • In Showgirls the main character Nomi works in a strip club and aspires to be a topless dancer in a Las Vegas show. At one point she gives a man a lapdance that basically amounts to sex with a denim condom, she was perfectly willing to do what came down to live, on-stage lesbian sex, screwing her boss to get a higher position, and pushing the lead dancer down the stairs to get her job, but when she's asked during an audition to use ice cubes to make herself more, ahem, perky, her angry refusal is treated as a display of strength of character. Why the line of moral compromise is drawn at that exact point is perhaps the only thing the movie leaves to the viewer's imagination.
  • In Surrogates - and, for that matter, almost every movie about virtual reality - it's taken as a given that using artificial means to lead exactly the kind of life you want is inherently morally inferior to actually going out and leading your own boring life. Even though the users feel and experience everything their surrogates do (so it feels just as real as doing it in person except you won't die if, say, your parachute doesn't open), and actually are interacting with other people (they just don't see what they really look like), and the movie tells us in the opening that the use of Surrogates has almost completely wiped out racism and sexism. Yeah, but ... it's not real, man!!!
  • In Shaun of the Dead, David is sensible if insensitive for most of the film and is treated as a (literal) punching bag by Shaun. Him trying to shoot the latter in retaliation for the punch was a bit much, but even his argument of staying in the apartment is proved right by the end. As it's a parody of typical zombie movies it may have been intentional, and additionally while he's perhaps more sensible than Shaun, he's still not that sensible; he makes several mistakes throughout (such as hefting a bin through the pub window to get in without checking to see if there were other entrances, leaving them with a gaping hole in their defences). Furthermore, his challenging of Shaun is often based less on what the right thing to do would be and more on just not liking Shaun personally, being jealous of his relationship with Liz and his desire to be difficult; as his own girlfriend points out, if he was that sure of what to do he'd take charge instead of just following Shaun and making snide comments from the sidelines. So while he might not necessarily be wrong, he's also just a pompous know-it-all.
    • To a lesser extent, Shaun's other friend Pete is depicted as a bit of a prick for his obvious contempt for Shaun's best friend Ed, viewing him as a load who holds Shaun back. However, even before the events of the Zombie Apocalypse in which Ed increasingly becomes The Load for real, it's hard not to think that Pete has a point.
      • Pete's really not treated as being wrong; Shaun is clearly unable to come up with a good defense for Ed early on, and there's especially the scene in front of the Winchester. Shaun seems to genuinely acknowledge that Ed is The Load despite attempt after attempt on his part to fix that, and is angry at him for constantly proving Pete right.
  • Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is depicted as a Jerkass Dean Bitterman who's going overboard with trying to discipline Ferris (admittedly, he broke the law and committed animal cruelty), though that doesn't change the fact that Ferris is skipping school, has done so at least nine times prior (he hacks into the school computer to change the records), and does so by blatantly exploiting the good will of everyone, including his parents. Some reviewers, particularly Dr. Insano, have regarded Rooney as the movie's true hero, and Ferris as the true villain.
  • A movie called Women Obsessed shows a man physically beating his new wife and menacing his stepson. At one point he seemingly rapes the wife, (which is a case of What Happened to the Mouse? since we don't see what happens after he closes the door). She gets pregnant by him and ends up losing the baby. He carries her six miles to the hospital. At the doctor's house, she tells the doctor that she wants to leave him because he's abusive. The doctor then chastises her because of his heroics last night. She's portrayed as wrong in this situation and the movie ends with her begging him for forgiveness. This is also a case of Values Dissonance, since the movie was made in 1959, a time when attitudes towards spousal and parental abuse were in several ways very different.
  • Mickey in She's The One falls out with his new wife Hope for assuming he would go to Paris with her without discussing it with him first, which seems like a reasonable point, yet he is blamed for it and even says himself that he ruined the relationship. The only reason given for him being to blame is that he "didn't fight for her" but Hope didn't fight for him either and was in the wrong in the first place.
  • The Wizard (film) has an antagonist whose job is finding the missing children and bringing them home. He might occasionally Poke the Poodle and be a Jerkass, but the bad guy's job is locating missing kids for their parents. The movie tries to sell him as a villain. When he is hit with a false accusation of sexual assault by an underage girl, The Wizard portrays this as heroic cleverness on the girl's part.
  • In the Ed Wood-penned The Violent Years, Villain Protagonist Paula's parents are painted as neglectful (explicitly so by the Jerkass judge who bookends the movie), providing for her physical well being and ignoring her emotional needs. Though every time we see them, they're either talking to or about Paula. They're also both shown as being up to date on her life and interests give her pretty much anything she asks for. So, apparently, "neglectful" meant "not tending to your spoiled, rebellious daughter's emotional needs at all times."


Literature

  • The Inheritance Cycle is criticized for failing to actually show the informed Evil Empire doing anything much worse than collecting taxes and taking action against terrorists. Despite the existence of a long list of its evil actions they are all either part of the backstory or occurring far away from the action, while by comparison the heroes are (apparently unintentionally) depicted as shockingly open-minded on morals.
    • Although hunting Eragon and determining the name of the Ancient Language, which gives one power over magic can't leave a lot of time for personal atrocities, Galbatorix's subjects commit atrocities, and Galbatorix's immense magical power is due to essentially enslaving the souls or hundreds, if not thousands, of physically-dead dragons.
  • The Michael Crichton novel Timeline reveals that the Corrupt Corporate Executive who owns the Time Machine at the center of the novel is planning to market it to the rich and powerful, to host tour groups to the past. And That's Terrible, so much so that the heroes use the time machine strand him in the middle of the Bubonic Plague as punishment. Except, as the novel repeatedly reminds the reader, this form of time travel doesn't cause paradoxes because the past can't be changed: instead, it's more like traveling between identical Alternate Universes that are out of historical sync with one another (this is presented a little inconsistently, since the heroes first got involved via a letter from the past, but the book holds to that explanation regardless). So, apart from an assumed Alien Non-Interference Clause towards those other timelines that doesn't actually exist in the book (since it takes place in today's world), there doesn't seem to be anything really wrong with his plan. It's just confirmed as wrong by the horrified reactions of the heroes. This apparently wasn't lost on the movie producers: The Film of the Book instead has the villain accidentally stranding himself in the past while trying to kill the heroes.


Live Action TV

  • In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, they developed a Logic Bomb that could have wiped out the Borg race. It eventually goes unused because killing the whole species would be genocide. But... it's the BORG! Their entire existence is one long series of massive genocides! Besides, they're a collective consciousness, so you're in some sense only killing the one individual responsible for all the horror and death. Eventually the show itself confronted the issue in the episode where Lore took control of the Borg separated from the collective; Picard admits that although he may have made the moral choice in not using the logic bomb, it may not have been the right choice.
    • However, later episodes also show that it wouldn't have worked anyway, so it would have been an immoral action to no real point.
  • An episode of Battlestar Galactica contained a similar situation, but raised to the nth degree. The humans developed a virus capable of killing every Cylon that was linked to the collective, which was every Cylon in the universe except Athena. The writers obviously expect us to side with Helo and Athena against this genocide. The problem is that everything up to that point suggested that the genocide is justified. The Cylons had already killed countless billions of people, leaving a remnant of about 50,000 that they were still trying to kill. There was no indication at the time of any dissent within the linked Cylons towards killing humans. And the odds of survival for the remaining humans without using the virus appeared infinitesimally low.
    • As Picard pointed out in the above Star Trek example, and as Helo points out in this case, it's a matter of whether the ends justify the means. If humanity is willing to wipe out another entire race of sentient beings, would we deserve to be the race that survived the conflict? The dissenters argue that we should hold onto what makes humanity worth saving even if it means facing nearly impossible odds.
    • Another possible counterargument is that the genocide is not advisable because it would not be guaranteed to be total (there is a nonzero, and maybe nontrivial, possibility that the Cylons can get a warning out in time for the furthest away resurrection ships out of range to disconnect themselves and avoid the plague spread), and doing it and failing to get a 100.00% kill would motivate the surviving Cylons to absolutely exterminate the human race without the slightest possibility of reconciliation or even just eventually giving up on the pursuit, thus locking humanity into total doom (as the only possibilities for humanity are Cylons exterminate humanity, humans exterminate Cylons, or some type of eventual peaceful resolution... and a failed genocide attempts means #2 is not achievable and #3 is no longer possible). Unfortunately for the episode quality that's not the argument Helo made, so he still looks like an idiot.
  • Dustin suffers from this, once in Power Rangers Ninja Storm. While working late at Kelly's store, some hardmen working for a Corrupt Corporate Executive that Kelly refused to sell her store to, break in, with the intention of trashing the store. Dustin morphs and scares them away. Next morning he gets a minor slap on the wrist for using his Ranger powers for "everyday problems". Although Dustin does have the good sense to point out that they fight bad guys all the time and there was nothing wrong with what he did. Later in the same episode, while Shane is skateboarding in front of a news crew, a monster attacks. Dustin goes to battle the monster alone. The camera men all forget Shane and go to film the fight. Afterwards Shane chews Dustin out for not calling him for help, which would have messed up his chance to get on TV anyway, and might have looked a bit suspicious. Later other Rangers join in lecturing him about doing the right thing. Apparently the right thing is not to steal Shane's limelight (which ironically, Red Rangers in the Disney seasons are really bad for).
  • Erika in Nip Tuck is treated as venomous bitchy Mother-In-Law character in nearly all of her appearances, and is wailed on for aggravating Julia's sense of insecurity. The problem is, in most of her appearances, Erika is trying to get Julia to stand up for herself and be proactive instead of wallowing in a giant pool of Wangst over how unsatisfied she is with her life. Sure, she's a bitch, but a comparatively minor one considering Julia's husband regularly engages in in-your-face cheating as petty revenge. It's difficult to see her as a bad person for saying Julia wasted her life by not becoming a doctor when Julia herself feels the exact same way.
  • In the TV series of Time Cop, the tech guy is portrayed this way. In one episode, he chronically suggests that they not time jump right away and let him tinker with the time machine to figure out why it's acting weird, and is always dismissed out of hand for not doing things "the police way". And then the time machine screws up again. This happens several times.
  • The Young and The Restless has had this with the larger Adam storyline. When Adam is confronted in the cabin he makes a point of noting the hypocrisy of the moral absoluteness the other characters are pulling on him. Part of the show's overarching plots, after all, are about the crimes the Newmans and Abbotts regularly pull against each other. While the tone is meant to be that the nature of Adam's crimes is such that the cabin event is justified, it's hard to escape the fact that everything he's saying about the Newmans and Abbotts is true. JT even calls Victoria out on this once she mentions this to him, angrily stating that regardless of what Adam did, the Newmans and Abbots have this disturbing habit of meting out their own brand of justice, usually without any regard to whether or not the target deserved it.
    • This has been echoed by Detective Pomerantz, who has refused to consider the theory that Adam faked his death in large part because the Newmans and Abbotts have done such a fantastic job over the years of wriggling out of punishment for crimes quite similar to Adam's murder. It's hard to ignore the fact that, while in this specific case Pomerantz is wrong, there's a veritable laundry list of crimes that the Newmans and Abbotts actually did do which they were never punished for, and Palmerance even mentions several of them noting before he leaves that he could do so all night.
  • The premise of Gilmore Girls is that Lorelai Gilmore, after getting pregnant and dropping out of school, distanced herself from her parents as she felt they were being over-controlling and not letting her make her own decisions. Later in the series, her own daughter, Rory, goes through a similar situation where she drops out of school and feels her mother is being over-controlling and not letting her make her own decisions. The writing seems to imply that it was right for Lorelai to trust in her decisions re: her mistakes and that it was bad for her parents to resent her for her actions, but goes out of its way to present Lorelai's abandonment of Rory to be justified.
  • Most sitcom fathers are this, especially if their wife is a Jerk Sue. The most famous examples are probably Ray Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond and the infamous Sweetheart's Day episode of My Wife and Kids.
  • The episode of iCarly, "iMeet Fred". Freddy simply and inoffensively states that he doesn't think that Fred from YouTube is funny. Fred then pulls a Rage Quit over the statement causing the entire earth's population to rise up and turn against Freddy. At the end, Sam pulls Freddy into a room and physically beats him with a tennis racket until he takes his opinion back. Fred then admits that he did all of this just to get some publicity. If you noticed, at no point did anybody apologize to Freddy for their violent revolt against him and at no point was Freddy standing up for his own opinion shown to be a good thing in the episode.
    • In addition to this, it completely ignores (even by RoF standards) the fact that Freddy's opinion isn't a minority opinion; in fact, it's a majority. IRL, Fred is widely derided by both the general public, and (even moreso) critics. In fact, if anything, the Fangirls are very much the Vocal Minority.
  • An episode of Family Matters had both Harriet and Richie passive aggressively mock and chastise Carl, essentially for liking the Three Stooges. They paint Carl as being a childish sadist for liking a show about people being physically hurt, seemingly forgetting that the Three Stooges is one of the most famous series ever made and arguably set the ground for the sitcom genre and especially physical comedy after it, including Family Matters.
  • Smallville: Dr. Chisolm sounds like just another 'alien-conspiracy' nutcase killing off helpless Kandorians who just want to live peacefully among humans but whom he fears are part of an alien invasion. Good thing the cruel and horrific experiments the 'peaceful' Kandorians performed on him and other humans to regain their Kryptonian powers so they could Take Over the World occurred offscreen or they'd seem more like asshole victims.
    • Even Clark called them out on that one, saying that human beings are not their personal guinea pigs. Part of his agreement to help was because they were his people.
  • Home and Away had a scene where Nick Smith is told off by his brother Will for having a new girlfriend, as this isn't being nice to his ex Jade. Considering that his new girlfriend isn't a friend of Jade and he isn't flaunting the relationship in front of her, it's hard to see exactly what he did wrong.
  • Nathan, the love interest of Kelly in The Secret Life of Us, is depicted as having betrayed Kelly for getting oral from a woman at a party, even though it happened after Kelly and he had split up and despite Kelly kissing a man and almost having a threesome at the same party.
  • Happens more often than not in All in The Family, in which the assumption that Archie is always wrong runs so strongly that the writers often don't even bother to try to justify Mike's positions. Norman Lear's Opinion Myopia was a large factor in the show's Misaimed Fandom.
    • It was less Opinion Myopia than Misaimed Fandom. Lear and star Carrol O'Connor meant for Archie and Mike to be dueling strawmen: Archie representing the conservative working class, who held on to outdated beliefs to their own detriment, because they were taught to value conformity. Mike represented this kind of "pointy-headed liberals" O'Connor despised; young people with no real life experience, who's solutions to society's problems would be laughably naive even to the target audience. They never justified either case, because they thought it was self-evident both men had it wrong.
  • Happens sometimes on Hoarders and similar shows, when the subject is merely an annoyance to friends and family, rather than at risk for illness or injury or legal action,[1] and their behavior, if not exactly reasonable, is at least defensible.
  • In one episode of Wizards of Waverly Place, Stevie is considered "evil" because she leads a revolution against the law that says all children must battle their siblings and end up with only one having their powers. This isn't even argued about, no one mentions that Alex agreeing with Stevie might be because she just has a different opinion, and in the end Alex agrees that it's 100% evil. Besides that, Comedic Sociopathy is taken to new levels in that episode when they kill Stevie off.
  • Ted in How I Met Your Mother is portrayed as a jerk for still seeing his little sister Heather as an irresponsible teenager. However, Heather does have a long history of being irresponsible and the way she proved to Ted she was responsible was to have her and Barney undress in his office and pretend they had sex, get caught by Lily and then accuse Ted of being a jerk for making the obvious assumption that they had sex. What a great way to prove she was a smart and mature adult.
  • In Glee, Brittany dumps Artie after he calls her stupid. Keep in mind that he calls her stupid because she was cheating on him with another girl in Santana. Note that this was also done to make way for the Fan Preferred Les Yay Couple The breakup wouldn't be so bad but the episode in question goes out of it's way to paint Artie as the wrong party, and neither Brittany nor Santana are ever called out on it.
  • When Prime Minister Harriet Jones orders the destruction of a retreating Sycorax warship in the Doctor Who episode "The Christmas Invasion", the following scene manages the intricate feat of having both sides show Informed Wrongness, with the Doctor immediately using it as evidence that she isn't fit to govern Britain. The Prime Minister is entirely correct that she lives in a universe where such extraterrestrial threats are a regular occurrence, the entire population of Earth had almost died, and humanity has every right to build and stockpile whatever weapons for their own defense that they can. On the other hand, the Doctor is also entirely correct that holding a parley with an enemy, negotiating a cease-fire, and then shooting them in the back as they leave is an epically bad idea, because once you get a reputation for killing people under a parley flag the results are entirely predictable and well-known in historical precedent; effective diplomacy becomes impossible for you because no one will remotely trust you in negotiations any longer, and a near-total inability to engage in interstellar diplomatic relations would have dire and crippling effects on humanity's eventual expansion into the stars. However, in the show neither side makes either of these arguments. The Doctor chooses instead to go off on a heavy-handed "man is the real monster" message and PM Jones retaliates with a plea towards 'well, what do we do if you're not here?'... as a justification for doing something at a time when the Doctor not only was there, but had just finished solving the problem. The argument is resolved by the Doctor sabotaging her political career, which changes Earth's history and averts a future Golden Age. And so, clumsy writing turns a situation where both sides could have had an entirely valid point and faced a genuine ethical dilemna into one where both sides end up looking like idiots, for reasons neither side bothers to coherently articulate.

Newspaper Comics

  • In For Better or For Worse, April, as the family black sheep, was Always Wrong. Anything she liked was bad and dumb and lame, and anything she didn't particularly care for was endemic to good Canadian values. The reality of the strip itself would be rewritten if that's what it took for April to always be wrong.
    • Which makes some very unfortunate implications about the rest the family since the one consistent thing she likes is her grandfather.


Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons has many [evil] spells that aren't themselves evil. One example is Deathwatch, a spell that checks if people are alive, crippled or dead. Another is Animate Dead, which create non-sentient life by harnessing raw energy and has entire Sourcebooks on how evil is, even though the morality of creating golems (where you enslave a sapient being) is never brought up. It's more about cause then effect, as while the spell themselves don't result in harm they still call upon supernatural dark forces. Not very pragmatic, but there is a logic to it.
    • Of course, this just pushes it back a bit - what's so inherently evil about calling upon this particular source of unearthly power?
    • Explored in depth here

Video Games

  • Exactly why was Shinra's plan to destroy Meteor in Final Fantasy VII so despicable that the main party had to sabotage it the entire way? Huge Materia are slightly useful (Bahamut ZERO) but as far as they knew (if the player fails to sabotage Shinra's plan, it still doesn't work, but there's no way the heroes could have known that at the time) perhaps leaving it up to the evil corporation might have saved Midgar from being horribly destroyed.
    • It may have been the logic that Sephiroth's entire plan was to damage the planet's lifestream. Huge materia are huge collections of the same energy. Throwing them out into SPACE is perhaps playing into his hands a little? Basically I saw it not as the game saying 'it's wrong' but more 'if it fails we're screwed, so lets not risk it.'
    • My interpretation was that in the best case scenario, Shinra gathers all the world's Huge Materia and fires them off to destroy the meteor. Sephiroth then takes some time to recharge, then summons a second meteor and now that there is no more Huge Materia, nothing would stop him. However if the party steals the Materia and uses it to empower themselves (in the plot it is incredibly powerful even if the player doesn't find any use in it), they are proceeding with the original plan of going after Sephiroth himself and stopping the meteor with Holy. It's a case of stopping the source not the symptom.
  • During World of Warcraft's Rage of the Firelands patch, the Night Elf Druid Leyara switched sides with Fandral Staghelm and became a Druid of the Flame because her daughter had been killed in one of the Horde's attacks on Ashenvale, an attack she felt could have been prevented if Malfurion Stormrage had taken a more proactive stance against the Horde. When he learned of this, Malfurion seemed to believe she was being unreasonable, but many players felt her anger was justified (and perhaps even agreed with her line of thinking, at least right up until she jumped off the slippery slope).
    • In the now-removed Battle for the Undercity questline, after killing Putress King Varian angrily confronts Thrall and Sylvanas, and after being ported out of the city by Jaina, declares war on the Horde. Everyone involved, including Jaina (who's supposed to be on the same side as Varian) thinks he overreacted. But Varian had just seen a laboratory full of dead Alliance citizens the Forsaken had been torturing and experimenting on, while the two factions were supposed to be at peace, in order to develop a superweapon that had just been used against the Alliance. How was he supposed to react?


Web Comics

  • In Treading Ground, protagonist Nate was cast as a repressed asshole by his and Rose's circle of friends for not giving in to Rose's advances, up to and including Rose stripping in front of him. Somehow lost in all of this is that Rose was 17 and Nate was in his 20s. And the fact that Rose agreed to wait until she was 18 before they pursued anything more than Just Friends (an agreement they came to when she was 16). It was heavily implied early on that Nate came up with that pact hoping Rose would get tired of waiting and move on to someone closer to her age, but that line of thought seemed to have been dropped by the end. Possible intentional Moral Dissonance at work.
    • It was brought up in-story that the age of consent in their state (South Carolina) is 16, and that neither Rose nor Nate - possibly intentionally on his part - were aware of this. Which still leaves the ridiculous idea that Nate was a jerk for not wanting to sleep with a teenager (even one as willing as Rose).
      • Or the ridiculous idea that any person is a jerk purely because they don't want to have sex with another person that, among other things, they're not even in a relationship with.
  • Dominic Deegan refers to Alterism as unnatural and Alterists as creepy. We don't actually see any Alterists save for one student doing some amateur work on himself and one hairdresser who only used the magic to style hair and we are never shown how Alterism is any more unnatural than pumping your head full of "ecomancy", the "natural" equivalent, beyond some bad hairdos. This was eventually addressed in one arc where Dominic and Luna admitted their dislikes stem from Freudian Excuses and alterism is show to be akin to surgery, though with some more bizarre possibilities. It's still generally considered "wrong" in-verse due to a bad rap from its use by people more for physical enhancement than medical treatment.

Western Animation

  • Parodied in a Robot Chicken sketch entitled Twelve Angry Little People. A Rogue Juror insists they not convict a boy of murder because one of the witnesses must have been mistaken about her testimony, since she normally wears glasses and wouldn't have them on when she woke up and allegedly saw the crime (an obvious reference to 12 Angry Men). A dog on the jury points out that there is incontrovertible DNA evidence at the scene of the crime pointing to the boy. The Rogue Juror replies by saying- "why are we listening to you? You're a *BLEEP* ing dog!"
  • Done rather frustratingly in Captain Planet and the Planeteers with Wheeler, who gets dismissed as an idiot even when he has a point. In at least one episode the others brought him around to their way of thinking, then arbitrarily switched sides and he was considered wrong again.
    • The episode "The Numbers Game" takes this to bizarre levels---at the beginning of the episode he opines that people shouldn't have children they can't afford to support, and the others call him out for being unsympathetic to poor people. Then he goes to sleep and has a dream where he and Linka are married with a whole bunch of kids, which leads to a horribly wasteful world since having more than two kids is bad for the environment, and his dream-friends chew him out again for being so irresponsible. He then wakes up and tells Linka that if they get married one day, he only wants two kids at most. The episode sets it up as if he learned a lesson... but by the show's own standards, he was right the whole time!
      • At one point, they did the same debate, except in this episode Wheeler was on the exact opposite side of the argument, and was still considered wrong.
  • Also a major trait of Eric from the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. This is one of the most famous examples of The Complainer Is Always Wrong. No matter how reasonable his objections were, the other characters ignore him, and we're supposed to side with them.
    • Eric is usually right, though, and the show doesn't mind pointing this out at all.
  • In Gargoyles, Goliath and Elisa help the Avalon clan defend themselves from Oberon, who wants to drive them out. One of the clanmembers points out that technically the clan is squatting on Oberon's rightful property, but her thought is quickly dismissed and we're supposed to side with the gargoyles. To his credit, Oberon was willing to settle the matter democratically at the end, so at least it wasn't a matter of him being completely wrong as the Avalon clan proving themselves worthy to stay on Avalon, and there's no question that Oberon is still top dog over the human residents.
    • Though it didn't get explored on the episode, this could be a case of Fridge Brilliance if one considers how the two different races would logically see the issue. 1,001 years seems like a lot to a human or a gargoyle, but since the Third Race is immortal, Oberon probably doesn't think of his absence as much more than a very long vacation. To him, it was probably about how Elisa would feel if she got back to her apartment to find some homeless guy living there, arguing that he had a right to stay since she hadn't been there in six months. (And of course, the issue gets even more muddled since 1,001 "normal" years would have been less than fifty on Avalon...)
  • In Skunk Fu!, the Big Bad, Dragon, is mentioned to have been "punished for his arrogance". In his full backstory, it's said that the valley the characters live in was under an intense drought. When Dragon asked the Heavens if he could use his water powers to stop the drought, the Heavens didn't respond at all. So Dragon went ahead and ended the drought with rainfall. The Heavens then punished him by stripping him of his water powers and trapping him in a mountain prison. So... he arrogantly saved the valley, apparently.
    • This is most likely based on a Chinese legend on how the four rivers were made. Four dragons of water went much the same way as Dragon did and gave the people water after being refused permission, and were punished by the gods by being turned into rivers. Seeing as China presents the afterlife as a Celestial Bureaucracy and deference to authority is taken very seriously, apparently the way Dragon was "arrogant" is that he thought himself above those that told him when he was able to use his powers.
      • But in this case, they didn't tell him one way or the other; he didn't defy the heavens because they didn't respond.
  1. ↑ and sometimes even then, when the legal action comes across as a community criminalizing non-conformity
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