< Misaimed Fandom

Misaimed Fandom/Film

Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Film.

  • The Dark Knight's version of The Joker is an especially disturbing case of Misaimed Fandom, since we're talking about a Complete Monster who does his evil deeds For the Evulz. And even though he makes a plot-critical miscalculation of human nature at the climax of the film, Joker fanvids like this one say things like "everything The Joker says is true." They wrote him extremely well, and he was acted very well by an actor who died between filming and release. He lives in a Crapsack World where his Nietzsche Wannabe philosophies do seem true at first and still have truth in them, but it's heavily implied that he crafts these philosophies to get under people's skin or persuade them, not because he actually believes what he says.
    • There's a similar (albeit more understandable) Misaimed Fandom towards Ra's al Ghul in the previous Batman film, Batman Begins. Consider, for example, this video; some users in the comments section were saying they prefer Ra's al Ghul's philosophy to Batman's and that Ra's al Ghul had the right idea, whereas Batman was just foolishly defending a city with no hope. There is a difference between agreeing with a Nietzsche Wannabe Complete Monster and agreeing with a Knight Templar Well-Intentioned Extremist, but the issue is the same: people agreeing with the villain more than the director probably intended.
      • Although in Ra's case, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer did both state that everything Ra's said was true, unlike The Joker. However it's defending Ra's methods (turning all of Gotham into mindless lunatics to destroy the guilty few) that mark him as firmly in this trope.
  • Mean Girls is most popular (almost to the point of cult status) among the same kinds of teenage girls that it spends two hours mercilessly making fun of. In any given American High School, you're likely to meet more than a few suspiciously Regina George-like girls who have every line of the film memorized.
    • Misaimed fandom often results from the viewer's failure to grasp certain subtleties, but this could be the opposite; because the Plastics are caricatures, their real life equivalents may not see themselves reflected in them.
    • On the flipside, awareness of the Regina George archetype may be contributing to its downfall.
  • If Scarface isn't the epitome of a film doomed for misaimed fandom, nothing is. Brian De Palma intended for this movie to be a dark, unrelenting look at the downfall of a gangster who quickly climbed to the top of the drug trade world, only to become addicted to coke and alienate those around him. Instead, rappers sample Tony Montana's quotes, admire him for being all gangster, and have a bunch of their fans and misled teens suddenly become fans or the film without seeing what the point of the film was at all. Brian De Palma isn't happy about this at all.
    • A frakkin' VIDEO GAME of the movie was made too. Which was a sequel to the movie, dictated that Tony Montana somehow SURVIVED the ending of the film, and has him go about his business with no negative consequences. Takes misaimed fandom up to eleven.
    • This misaimed fandom has been parodied before. Slipknot's tune (sic) parodies this by sampling the quote from Carlitos Way "Here comes the pain!". Another example is in The Lonely Island video "Jack Sparrow" where at the end, when the guys tell Michael Bolton that Pirates of the Caribbean is not an appropriate example for their song, one of the films he references is Scarface, dressed as Tony Montana with a machine gun, tossing cocaine around, using one of his "cock-a-roaches" quotes, and closing his solo by yelling "THIS TOWN IS A GREAT BIG PUSSY WAITING TO GET FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED!!!!"
  • Fight Club. Let's just say people take the advice of a sociopath too seriously and leave it at that.
  • There is a sequence in the movie version of Pink Floyd's The Wall where Pink hallucinates that he is a fascist leader, leading a vicious army of skinheads. This scene is meant as a look at the relationship between a performer and his fans... but a group of Real Life white supremacists didn't get the joke and based themselves off the scene, adopting the crossed-hammers symbol of Pink's army and dubbing themselves the "Hammerskins".
    • Let us not forget that a great deal of the extras in that scene were in fact legitimate white supremacists. They were picked simply because of the energy they would generate in a scenario like the one Pink is creating in his head. If you look carefully, you can actually see many of them giving the Nazi salute which was 100% improvisation on their part.
    • Even the album it's based on was influenced by misaimed fandom; Roger Waters (Pink Floyd's bassist and leader) once stated this in an interview. During the tour for Animals, members of the audience were so crazed that a mesh fence had to be erected between the stage and the seats, creating a literal wall. (It was not lost on Waters.) In one incident, a fan climbed up the fence; Waters insulted and spat on him... and the fan went nuts. Not mad, but happy. Waters decided that a metaphysical wall existed and started working on the album.
    • The movie also has a lot of misogyny due to the main character being an Unreliable Narrator who has issues with women. You sometimes run into fans of the film who praise it for showing "the truth about women" or something.
  • Gordon Gekko from Wall Street was supposed to represent the worst excesses of the 1980s. Many people took him as a role model, taking his famous "Greed is Good" speech at face value. Michael Douglas did too good a job at making him charming.
    • As Oliver Stone stated in the DVD commentary, Gekko's speech was supposed to be compelling and even correct to a degree. Stone was a fan (with qualifications) of free market capitalism. There are much more evil things about Gekko than his belief in American 'greed'.
      • Still, if the trailer to Wall Street 2 is to be trusted, these people are going to get a huge slap in the face.
        • He's talking about "bad greed" in the sequel though.
        • Arguably, he was talking about "good greed" in the original. Gekko never said "Greed is good" - he said "Greed, for want of a better word is good". That's a nuance people tend to miss.
    • Michael Douglas said that every time a stock broker says that Gekko was the inspiration for his job, he feels a little sad, as Gekko is clearly the villain.
  • Jarhead includes a scene in which the Marines cheer for Apocalypse Now. On the commentary track, it is noted that marines never see anti-war movies as such; the book the movie is based on goes so far as to say that there are no true anti-war movies precisely because this trope will always kick in.
    • Case in point: there are tales of Marines cheering the "soldier mutilates an Iraqi corpse" scene in Jarhead.
    • If it makes you feel better, a lot of Marines don't particularly like war movies. Or, rather, they don't care for them any more than an average young adult male would.
    • Also, most of the Marines are cheering for those movies because they think they're funny, not because they feel inspired by. War movies, especially the specific ones named here, largely come across to real servicemembers as parodies.
  • Similarly, many current or former military (or people who are staunch military supporters) are also fans of Full Metal Jacket.
    • This is likely due to the fact it was very close, just a touch over-the-top, of 'nam era training, just ask most any vet from around that time. Plus if you ever watched Mail Call, R. Lee Ermey is that way IN REAL LIFE, so Drill Sergeant Nasty himself is a case of Misaimed Fandom as well. (I believe it was either in the commentary or making of that he was specifically brought in just because of his prior military experience and how he acted.)
    • - Ermy was brought in initially as an adviser, when he showed the crew how a drill was done, he reportedly scared Kubrick so much that Kubrick decided to just use him in the movie instead of getting an actor. Just rewind a little there- he scared Stanley "Complete Lunatic" Kubrick. Wow.
  • There are fans of the film version of Battle Royale who seem to wish that they could enter The Program, with their classmates. This isn't helped by the in-film character who signed up "for fun" and seems to be having the psychotic time of his life.
  • Despite the fact that Paul Verhoeven is anti-war and anti-fascism (likely from having bombs dropped by the Allies in his backyard as a child when aiming at fascists), people will accuse him from now until judgment day that Starship Troopers glorifies war, fascism, and blind, jingoistic patriotism. To think Paul Verhoeven made the mistake of being too subtle.
    • And that's not even taking RoboCop into consideration! Textbook example of the audience not even realizing that the movie was making fun of them for taking it at face value.
    • In fairness, the original Heinlein novel on which Starship Troopers is based is genuinely and openly pro-military.
    • Given that "Misaimed Fandom" seems to be the only kind of fandom Starship Troopers, RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and !!Showgirls seem to have, it may not be that Verhoeven's "too subtle" about REALLY being anti-war/fascism/misogyny.
  • Linda Hamilton and James Cameron have both said on an audio commentary that Sarah Connor of the Terminator movies (after the original, anyway) was supposed to be a cruel, violent, emotionally unstable person, not an ideal feminist. John himself could arguably be considered a deconstruction of The Chosen One and/or Kid Hero: it shows what happens when your mother has been so determined to protect you that she drags you around the country committing acts of terrorism and teaching you paramilitary skills instead of anything close to a normal childhood. Maybe the Aesop was broken because, you know, she does raise the man who manages to defeat the machines, so she can't be all wrong... right?
    • The Aesop isn't broken so much as taken in a crazy direction. Sarah is played with brutal realism, being fully justified but not "right". She has noble goals but has become blind and insensitive to the cost of reaching them. The writer and actress see her as a monster for that lack of compassion whereas the fandom tend to see her as a hero trying to save the world despite the price. Depending on which aspects of the character one focuses on it verges between this trope and Straw Man Has a Point.
    • The misaimed fandom for Sarah Connor seems to have forgotten the scene in which she goes to Miles Dyson's house to murder him. Rewatch that scene, and marvel (or rather, shudder) at how good a Terminator she would make.
  • Leaving Las Vegas was criticized for glamorizing alcoholism. Apparently, these people missed the bit where the protagonist decides he's going to drink himself to death and does. Then again, that summary can translate easily to "alcohol is worth dying for".
  • Many, many mobster movies, such as The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino and Scarface. Far too many people see the big houses, beautiful women, expensive cars, and fancy suits and think of the protagonists as "men of honor". They completely forget that the characters are thieves, murderers, and drug dealers who lose everything and everybody close to them by the end. Worse still in that some of these movies are based on real events. The horrible things that the lead does in Goodfellas have Real Life analogues: Goodfellas was The Movie of a nonfiction book. Henry Hill is a real person.
    • Casino is also The Movie of another nonfiction book by the same author, Nicholas Pileggi. Ace Rothstein was based on an actual guy, though the name was changed and Ace is comparatively less of a thuggish bastard, if only by virtue of certain incidents not making it into the film.
  • Taxi Driver has Robert DeNiro trying to kill a politician. Some guy watched the movie many times, got obsessed with Jodie Foster and, after many attempts to contact her, decided to impress her by shooting Ronald Reagan...
    • Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader blames Executive Meddling for the intentional toning down of Travis Bickle's racism (he was much more susceptible to muttering about the N-words and W-words, in addition to inciting hate crimes), thus making DeNiro's character a complex counterculture icon rather than the paranoid, simpleminded racist the character was intended to be.
  • As Clive Barker, creator of the Hellraiser series, put it, "You've got Pinhead, who hasn't done a single decent thing in eight movies, and still gets mail from women who want to have his children."
    • Given the sadomasochistic themes of the Hellraiser films, its debatable how much of this is really misaimed.
  • Rollerball found its biggest success among people who were excited only by the rollerball scenes. Rollerball is a ridiculously violent sport that is the centerpiece of the movie's satire of a society increasingly desensitized to violence (another scene features people at a party blowing off steam by taking a flamethrower to some trees.) Some sports people even asked the filmmakers' permission to create a rollerball league. Almost certainly this is due to the deliberate slowness most of the Author Filibuster scenes are played: The non-sport scenes are either a bit of wonderful contrast, or really draggy.
    • The cast of rollerball players in the movie actually had a great deal of fun actually playing rollerball between takes and before and after shooting using the areas and props depicted in the film.
  • Disaffected youth have long put up posters of Hud in their rooms as a mark of admiration for this iconic counter-culture hero. The story is about Hud trying to get his father falsely declared mentally incompetent and himself power of attorney so he can sell his father's farm and keep the money. And he attempts to rape his love interest.
  • Harry Lime from The Third Man is a black marketeer who sells his loyal girlfriend to the Russians and runs a "medical charity" that sells watered-down penicillin that results in mass death and illness. The movie even goes so far as to show a hospital room full of dying children. How does the audience respond? By demanding more adventures of Harry Lime. The result was a radio series chronicling his further adventures. This may have had something to do with the excellent performance by Orson Welles.
    • One of the interesting things about The Third Man is that this also happens within the film. Most of the main characters are convinced that Harry is just a loveable rogue, the protagonist is actually taken to the hospital specifically to dissuade him of this belief. In the end his love interest hates him for turning against Harry, despite it being the right thing to do.
  • Romper Stomper and American History X are quite popular among Neo-Nazi skinheads.
  • Director Shusuke Kaneko clearly stated that Godzilla in the film Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack is pure evil and that no one is supposed to root for him. Guess which monster ends up getting the most praise.
    • He DOES already have a pre-installed fanbase who also have pre-installed expectations, even back then. He was just far too subtle about it since the movie boiled down to "Godzilla is doing what we expect Godzilla to, we do not sense any malice." He simply spent too long accidentally doing good. Godzilla is essentially a typecast kaiju, as evidenced by the need to create 'evil godzillas' in later movies when planning to portray the big G as a villain. So yes, this is technically not a complete Misaimed.
  • The Japanese live action/anime hybrid film Twilight of the Cockroaches was quite popular with various minorities, especially Jews who identified with the cockroaches' struggle to survive the humans' callous attempts to exterminate them. One can only imagine what their reaction would be on learning that, according to the director, the whole thing is an allegory for the fall of the Axis Powers.
  • A particularly creepy example of this trope: reportedly, teens were cheering in theaters during Schindler's List when Ralph Fiennes' monstrous Nazi officer randomly killed innocent people.
    • Not entirely correct, the reports were that teens were laughing in the theaters - and doing so got the entire class censured and nearly suspended - not cheering, there is a difference, even though there may not seem to be one at first gasp. Laughter, as in nervous laughter, as in these were a group of 14 and 15-year-olds faced with shockingly graphic, realistic and as a result harrowing violence. Nervous laughter is actually completely understandable.
      • Non-nervous laughter seems like a plausible reaction too, the scene was quite Narmy - the violence is blunt to the point of being cartoonish
    • There's also the quirk that Göth seems too much of a comical madman to be real. He appears to be at the level of a lovably insane dictator, like the pseudo Those Wacky Nazis of South America or Kim Jong Il...at least until you find out the REAL Göth was far worse. The nervous laughter could honestly be from either aspect.
      • It doesn't help that the scene in question is cut like it came out of a Monty Python film.
  • Debora Kampmeier's film Hounddog is meant to depict the horrible consequences of child abuse. Many critics (and viewers) see this differently.
  • Howard Beale of Network has quite a bit of quotable dialogue ("I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" for one), but many of his fans forget that he essentially went insane as a result of working in television news for too long, and treat him as some kind of visionary.
    • Interestingly, the Howard Beale example works equally well in-universe as well. Chayefsky brilliantly lampshaded the Misaimed Fandom nature of Beale's popularity, and yet the character is still subject to it in real life.
    • This one actually gets referenced in an issue of Spider-Man where Peter, tired of putting up with the universe constantly dumping on him, compares himself to Beale in a phone conversation with Mary Jane. After he hangs up, she sadly points out that Beale died at the end of the movie.
  • Many people sympathize with Colonel "You can't handle the truth!" Jessup of A Few Good Men and his famous courtroom speech in which he admits he ordered the "Code Red" ("You want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!") is admired by many.
    • Colonel Jessup may well have been right - but he still lied under oath, falsified evidence and tried to get two ordinary soldiers to bear the consequences of his actions. You can't claim a place in an organisation that claims to place a high value on Honour after doing something like that. As the saying goes, "There's the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine Corps way". Right or wrong, what he did wasn't the Marine Corps way.
      • This is a very conflicting case, because what Jessup is saying is essentially right, but he's saying it for all the wrong reasons.
      • Jessup is using the honor and reputation of the US military in general to try and cover up the fact that he himself personally lacks those virtues and has been teaching his men the wrong lessons. It's called 'wrapping yourself in the flag', although usually its done by politicians.
    • The worst part is that Jessup's breakdown isn't supposed to be the center of the movie - it's supposed to be about the duty of the strong to protect the weak, and how Jessup betrayed that duty when he had a kid brutalized and accidentally killed him for being weak. Nicholson should have been cast as Weinburg, not Jessup, so that he could have put his personality behind it. As is, everybody remembers Jessup talking about Necessary Evil.

Lt. Weinberg: They beat up on a weakling, and that's all they did! The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap! They tortured and tormented a weaker kid! They didn't like him! So, they killed him! And why? Because he couldn't run very fast!
Galloway: They stand upon a wall and say, "Nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch."
Dawson: We were supposed to fight for the people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willie.

  • Boys Don't Cry is about young trans man Brandon Teena struggling to find his identity as an adult and as a man, since for the first time in his life he can truly be who he is inside. Most reviewers loved it, but while sympathetic to the character, referred to Teena as female and seemed to think it was a story about a lesbian who felt she had to pretend to be a boy because of homophobia or something. One reviewer even said something like "in disguising herself, ironically, this young woman helped other girls find themselves." (Yikes.) In real life, Teena was your average somewhat macho straight guy and had the kind of enlightened opinions on feminism and lesbianism you'd expect from a young man born in the Bible Belt in the early seventies.
    • The fact that Boys Don't Cry is on at least thirty "Best Lesbian Movies" lists is even further proof. Most reviewers seemed to leave with the thought that it was a touching, heartbreaking lesbian film. And when told Brandon Teena was a trans man, and therefore not a lesbian, people will often say "she wasn't a real man, so obviously she was a lesbian" *Face Palm*.
      • Also, the movie doesn't shy away from the fact that Brandon Teena was not the finest, most upstanding human ever. Obviously, he didn't deserve to be raped or killed for his transgendered status, but he was known to have stolen checks from friends and lied to many people for many (usually petty) reasons. Teenaged girls (gay and straight) who think he was "so sweet" are misplacing their fandom.
  • With the The Wicker Man, there are two groups of misaimed neopagan viewers. Some, who have a beef with Christianity, actually applaud the Summerisle Pagan cult for killing devout Catholic Sgt. Howie at the end, despite the fact that this is murder and not supposed to be admirable or justified in the least, and while prudish and foolish, Howie was the one in the right here. Other neopagans resent the film for portraying their religion in a bad light, when in fact the Summerisle cult is stated in film to be a special case with a history behind it, and is in no way representive of other neopagan groups around the world. Christopher Lee himself states that it's less a condemnation of paganism and more of a condemnation of cults in general.
  • Francis Ford Coppola intended the opening speech in Patton, and Patton's character in general to be ludicrously jingoistic. However, many have found George C. Scott's portrayal of the WWII general patriotic and inspiring. Supposedly it was one of Richard Nixon's favorite movies. However the writer intention does not matter here because, of course, Patton was an actual person and that speech was a combination of many of his actual speeches. So people are not misinterpreting a character. They just like a real guy.
    • There will be many Jews, Gypsies and other minorities with ancestry who suffered and died in the Third Reich who would feel eternally grateful when Patton said of the Nazis: "We're not just going to shoot the bastards. We're going to carve out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks!"
  • Inverted with the film version of The Birth of a Nation where the fandom got the racist subtext of the original Thomas Dixon work but D. W. Griffith apparently didn't or just went with it anyways. Griffith was himself not really a racist; his next film Intolerance actually dealt with the negative effects of prejudice. His later film Broken Blossoms even went out of its way to make the Chinese protagonist very sympathetic as a reaction to the rabid anti-Chinese sentiment of the time.
    • Actually, Dixon was a racist, just not a violent one. He once said that saying he hated blacks would be like saying he hated children, because he felt that blacks were inherently child-like.
  • The 1970 film Joe starred Peter Boyle as a working-class reactionary who fantasizes about murdering hippies (and does so in the film's climax). Boyle was horrified to find audiences cheering the character at screenings, and reportedly turned down the role of Popeye Dole in The French Connection at least partly out of fear of inspiring a similar reaction.
  • Many viewers applauded Hard Candy as a Take That toward pedophiles. While Jeff is obviously beyond redemption for what he's done, many viewers don't take into account the fact that Hayley's methods are obviously supposed to demonstrate that she too is an incredibly sick individual. Word of God is that Hayley is a fledgling serial killer, who preys on ephebophiles like Jeff because they can be considered acceptable targets. Both Hayley and Jeff are intended to be equally repugnant.
  • August Rush managed to accomplish the inverse of this - it missed its intended demographic. It was supposed to play particularly well to musicians and music lovers, but those were the people most likely to spot the film's numerous problems.
  • A Clockwork Orange - see entry under Literature.
  • No soundtrack album was ever released for the Tim Robbins movie Bob Roberts (about a right wing folksinger-turned-candidate). It's been reported that Robbins worried that the music (satirical folksongs about such topics as drug use, immigration, welfare, etc., from the point of view of a right-wing straw-man) would be played out of context.
  • Glengarry Glen Ross was, like the play it was based on, a satire of the sales world and the dishonest lengths to which successful salesman will go, with Alec Baldwin's profanity-ridden "motivational" speech intended as the culmination of ruthless capitalism. However, many real-life sales managers now use said speech out of context as an actual motivator for salespeople.
    • Out of context my left earlobe; some agencies tell their workforces to watch the entire movie and remember what they're in for.
    • There are agencies who do get it. They show it for exactly the right reasons. Whether or not the employees figure it out/take home the post-film speech in place of the movie's own, however...
  • Avatar's position on technology. It seems to be advocating responsible, low-impact technology use. Given its general lack of subtlety, a subset of viewers interpreted it as anti-technology, instead of pointing out that it's the uses that matters while being more broadly anti-imperialist. Many pointed out the apparent Broken Aesop of a film that required oodles of technology to be anti-tech. In addition, there are the people who liked the marines despite their attempts at genocide, similar to the above examples for Jarhead and Apocalypse Now.
    • Some people consider that fifteen years of attempting peaceful contact and diplomacy, despite suffering attacks and raids the entire time, is going above and beyond what could be reasonably expected of anyone and that eventually you're justified in just saying 'Fuck it, you want a war so bad? YOU GOT ONE.'
    • There's also that the Na'vi have more advanced technology than the humans, what with biological computers, direct neural interface, digital mind uploading, etc, etc. It was just all given to them for free by the planet. So idolizing them as 'low-tech existence' is completely missing the point.
  • Saturday Night Fever is strongly remembered for John Travolta's iconic disco dance sequence at the end. However, within the movie itself, it is strongly implied that Travolta and his partner are actually the LEAST impressive dancers in the competition, and the only reason they win over their black and Puerto Rican opponents is because the judges are racist.
    • Travolta's character recognizes this and in disgust gives the trophy to the runner-up couple. It shatters his vision of himself and makes him want to move beyond the shallow lifestyle he built around disco. The movie is remembered for how glamorous it made disco look.
  • If the YouTube comments for the film The Believer are any indication, then the Nazi Villain Protagonist/Anti-Hero of the film has earned a lot of white supremacist fans despite the film being anti-Nazi and the protagonist being Jewish.
    • There's an actual school of thought behind this, do not recall the name for it but some 'moderate nazis/racists' advocate recruiting self-haters to fight in the streets while at the same time aiding those proud of their heritage to make enough to move home, and 'out of their country.' The most famous proponent of this school of thought is of course David Duke, followed by .
  • YouTube comments on Red Dawn indicate that there is a small fandom who do not see it as the pro-American film that was intended. This fandom sees the Wolverines as Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, Palestinians, or guerilla fighters from any other nation occupied by America or an ally of America. The Russians in the film are seen as Americans.
    • They may not be completely off-base. Though it took place in America, the film was not so much "pro-American" as it was "pro-resistance-to-the-Soviets". Considering the cultural context in which the film was made, it was likely intended to make viewers see the Afghans (who were fighting a Soviet occupation around that time) in a more humanized way, instead of as strange, distant people engaged in a war that didn't involve America directly.
    • This is the reason why the Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters trope exists.
      • Early on before the US got involved the Vietnamese where also fighting to get the occupiers out of their country those occupiers would be the french who had controlled Vietnam for decades.
      • Not to mention that most Iraqis have wanted the United States out of their country since 2005.
  • Many tween-age girls completely missed the point of Clueless -- a vapid and shallow girl realizes how meaningless that sort of life is -- and instead attempted to ape the fashion and attitude of the characters from the beginning of the film.
  • The Star Wars Galactic Empire has almost as much fandom as the Rebellion, due in no small part to having the most recognizable characters in the series. The presence of the Expanded Universe - where "Rebel = Good, Imperial = Bad" become increasingly less clear-cut as more works are produced - and the idea that Darth Vader is supposed to be the protagonist if you take all six films together have both led to a sort of apologism for the Empire's less ambiguously-evil figures as well. The 501st Stormtrooper Legion, a notable fanclub which often makes charity appearances at children's hospitals, was seen on the 30th anniversary of Star Wars marching rank-and-file at the Rose Parade, lead by a guy in a Darth Vader costume, with the Imperial theme tune playing in the background, with a lot of work put into the costumes and presentation. The applause they drew for the march could be read as a different kind of praise...
  • Kung Fu Panda: A good number of fans think of Tai Lung as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, forgetting the little bit of his murderous temper tantrum when he was refused the Dragon Scroll in the first place. The application of Never Say "Die" means that the extent of his crimes could not be depicted, leaving his Complete Monster status at Offstage Villainy levels. Without that, he comes out as arrogant and misguided rather than the intended near-nihilistically murderous.
  • The Elite Squad is the best example in Brazil, where Captain Nascimento is hailed as a "true Brazilian hero", despite it being obvious that the director's was portraying him as very deeply flawed at best, and a Complete Monster at worst.
  • "Das Millionenspiel" is a German movie from 1970 about a (fake) game show, which is about a group of people hunting and trying to kill the competitor, who will win one million Deutschmarks if he survives for 7 days. The film was pretty intense for its time and some people even thought it was a real game show. But that's not the point. Besides people who were complaining in indignation, there were also people who attended for becoming competitor, or even one of the hunters.
  • Characters like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees (all brutal serial killers) have huge fanbases, with many a teenage girl proclaiming their undying love for one or the other.
  • Allegedly Hitler liked The Great Dictator. (It is proven that he watched it twice, but it's not proven whether he liked it.)
  • The Dutch comedy series New Kids and the movie New Kids Turbo center around a group of anti-social losers who's music tastes and fashion sense went painfully out of style 20 years ago. The police in the area where the series is set claims that a sharp increase in (verbal) aggression towards police officers has been observed since the movie, where the protagonists do pretty much the same, came out.
  • Many people enjoy The Bourne Series for its action and car chase scenes, but cheer for the CIA the entire way through because they wish the real life U.S. government had a program like Treadstone/Black Briar in place.
    • In fact, the producers shot an alternate opening and closing sequence that played up to that sentiment, given the social/political climate at the time of its final release (originally 2001, pushed to 2002).
  • Judge Claude Frollo, from the Disney version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, was often thought of as cool despite having much less reason to be thought of as such (and much more NOT to) than other Disney villains. Instead of being a muscular macho-man like Gaston or a sorcerer like Jafar, he is a genocidal self-righteous old religious fanatic; an intent to subvert Evil Is Cool is somewhat apparent here, yet it apparently did not work either.
    • Must've been the song.
    • Speaking of Gaston, there's a number of fans who think that he's a fantastic guy who Belle was a bitch for not marrying. This is skating over the fact that he attempted murder, bribed the asylum owner to commit Maurice, and heavily implied that if/when he got Belle to marry him, he'd be forcing her to be the kind of woman he approved of.
  • Supposedly, the graphic rape in I Spit on Your Grave was supposed to be shocking and horrifying. When Roger Ebert reviewed it, he listened to what his fellow audience members said regarding it, and "if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals."
  • With some people, movies that try to discourage eating-disordered behavior actually have the opposite effect.
  • After the James Bond movie Licence to Kill was released, Robert Davi, who played drug lord Franz Sanchez, was taken to meet with an actual drug lord in South America. Apparently, he loved his portrayal of Sanchez.
  • Dr. Hannibal Lecter attracts a lot of fandom despite being a European aristocrat by birth with strong intellectual leanings who still displays snobbish elitism and who has little tolerance for poor taste. Oh, and did we mention he's also a maladjusted serial killer who eats his victims?
  • The villain of Thor, Loki. He is very clearly beloved by the fandom, particularly the female audience due to his very sympathetic portrayal. However, there are some fans that think that he was plainly evil and not sympathetic at all. This creates uncertainty as to whether the writers intended for Loki to be as popular and sympathetic as he became.
    • Given Loki's character arc in Thor 2 and 3, the answer seems to be "Yes they did."
  • Scream, a horror parody, actually helped the genre live past the 80s.
    • More specifically, it was intended to be a parody and final-nail-in-the-coffin for the Slasher subgenre. The film wound up having the opposite effect, and actually breathed new life into the then-dying genre.
  • Barry Humphries' fish-out-of-water movie The Adventures Of Barry Mc Kenzie was supposed to be a satire based on everything he detested about unrefined stereotypical Australian "ockers." In the end, according to director and co-writer Bruce Beresford, "the people he most loathed most loved the film" and were arguably the ones most responsible for getting the sequel made.
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