Misaimed Fandom/Video Games

Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Video Games.

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• Silent Hill 2 shows many misogynistic themes, perfectly summed up in the scene where a large, muscular man-monster is shown raping a creature composed of a pair of sexy legs, with another pair of sexy legs in place of an upper body. This was interpreted by many to mean that sexual objectification is cool and edgy, which was met with either approval or disapproval. It was actually intended as psychological symbolism of the main character's masculinity issues. The aforementioned muscular man-monster, Pyramid Head, is seen as a Draco in Leather Pants by his fans despite the fact that he does virtually nothing but violently rape and murder the other inhabitants of Silent Hill. A common term used to describe Pyramid Head by his fans is "sex deity", so apparently indiscriminate rape and psychological torture is sexy now. Similarly, there are those that consider the Bubble Head Nurses in the same game to be genuinely attractive despite designed to be something that really, really wasn't, and they are only the most obvious examples. Silent Hill fandom is almost as disturbing as the series itself.
  • One could reach a similar conclusion about Valtiel, the infamous monster from Silent Hill 3. This monster is a representation of the fear of being stalked or even sexually assaulted by someone who is obsessed with you. But like Pyramid Head, he has his share of fans.
    • Maybe because he's the one who resurrects Heather if she dies, but then the only reason he does so, or watches her at all, is because she is to birth a dark god.
  • Being a sex deity is not necessarily a good thing. See "the black goat with 1,000 young"
• Some fans of Final Fantasy IV prefer Cecil as a Dark Knight and wish he stayed that way instead of becoming a Paladin. First off, statistically, Dark Knight Cecil is generally inferior to Paladin Cecil. Second, Cecil is no more badass as a Dark Knight (in fact, it's when he becomes a Paladin when he begins to gain confidence and retaliating against the enemy.) Third, Evil Is Cool and Draco in Leather Pants don't even apply here since Cecil was never evil in the first place, just misguided. Finally, him staying as a Dark Knight is missing the point of the game; Cecil is The Atoner, the whole point is for him to change from what he was in his past and become a better person. This is not helped by Dissidia Final Fantasy, in which Cecil wields both classes cheerfully, without much regard to the fact that in Final Fantasy IV, Cecil hated being a Dark Knight and it was portrayed as a self-destructive path that led to misery and pain.
  • Fans' preference for Dark Knight Cecil over Paladin Cecil probably has less to do with stuff like that and more to do with the fact that he looked so much cooler as a Dark Knight.
  • The After Years clears up the Dark Knight and Dissidia issues somewhat by having Cecil face - and become reconciled with - The Dark Side of himself.
• Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII is a megalomaniacal Big Bad who spends most of the game on a murderous killing spree (including famously and brutally slaying a beloved main character), pausing only to mock and psychologically manipulate the main character, but he does it with such style and is such a Badass White-Haired Pretty Boy that fans lap it up and have turned him into a Draco in Leather Pants (see that entry for more). In the original game, Sephiroth was, in fact, fairly decent, if aloof and a bit cold, during the Nibelheim flashback, set before he goes insane, a portrayal retained in prequels; naturally, this just adds fuel to the Misaimed Fandom.
• People who complain about the Squall and Rinoa romance of Final Fantasy VIII, saying that he should have jumped Quistis's bones when she offered the opportunity simply because she's Ms. Fanservice. They never seem to pick up on the fact that, for one thing, Quistis's advances towards Squall are based entirely on her hopes of obtaining emotional support from a guy who's even more messed-up than she is... and for another, later in the game it's implied that Squall and Quistis engaging in such a relationship would be akin to Brother-Sister Incest. One is allowed to dislike the main romance, but yeah, Squall and Quistis, in hindsight, is pretty squicky.
  • Also, people who base support on a Sora and Namine romance due to the events of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which ignores that all of the memories Sora had of Namine were fake, and the feelings he had toward her were actually his feelings for Kairi increased to obsessive levels by the fake memories so that he would become Namine's - and thus, Marluxia's - slave. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be a good, loving thing.
    • It's partly influenced by Sora, toward the end of the game, stating that even if his memories were fake, he was happy to see Namine, and believes "the way (he) felt was no lie." Then again, Namine herself acknowledges that Kairi, not her, is Sora's most imporant person, and even without the screwed up memories, Namine is technically Kairi anyway.
• The original Leeroy Jenkins video from World of Warcraft was, despite being a staged over-the-top reconstruction of a real event, more a parody of "nerd guilds" with their excessive and sometimes nonsensical planning than a parody of Leeroy's player archetype.
  • The problem was that to players familiar with the encounter in the video, it makes sense to be cautious and plan things out as it can easily overwhelm the group once the event starts. Anyone who wiped out on the egg room because someone rushed in is not going to take kindly to Leeroy.
    • Except it wasn't poking fact at them being cautious, it was poking fun at them sitting there and quibbling over meaningless statistics, most of which were being used incorrectly.
  • Also some quests are clearly meant to be evil but players view these actions as justified. Good examples include the quest "The Broken Front", all Royal Apothecary quests and "It Was The Orcs, Honest!"
  • Some players sympathize with Malygos and his plans to curtail the use of magic without realizing that they would kill many people and put the world in danger.
  • The Leroy Jenkins video was meant to be humorous, and nothing else. In an ironic twist on it being called Misaimed Fandom, the people who really are fans of raiding and World of Warcraft in general immediately recognize that the group supposedly planning the encounter were essentially babbling nonsense and were overgeared for the encounter.
    • Add to this idea that waiting in a dungeon crawling with lethal enemies that won't hesitate to attack is impossible. Imagine a scene where people could wait outside of a doorway discussing tactics while an enemy could approach, yet doesn't simply because of loading. This is an unlikely measure only approachable because enemies "must" load. In the "real" world, enemies engage on sight and would not allow a team of ten heroes to formulate a plan before attack.
• Lezard Valeth from Valkyrie Profile was written to be as repulsive as possible, a sexually deviant stalker and violator of natural laws; like Harry Potter grown up terribly, terribly wrong. Some fans eat his character up, and pair him with the heroine of the first game. The blame/credit probably on the shoulders of his highly talented (and sexy-sounding) English voice actor. In the original Japanese version, he's more of a standard deep-voiced villain.
  • Then again, said Japanese voice actor is Takehito Koyasu.
  • Lezard Valeth is somewhat helped because of his importance to getting the best ending. The game seems to take it for granted that players would notice virtually every other appearance shows him to be a Complete Monster and even when he does help it is through means that he acquired by said Complete Monster tendencies.
• Modern Warfare 2 has a few different categories of this, the most obvious being a large part of the player-base that at best doesn't notice the series has an anti-war message and at worst takes a positive view of war because of it. The worst are, by far, the players who root for General Shepherd. It's largely because the game's finale involves him both kicking ass in a crazy action-scene, as well as being where he explains his motivation and ultimate goal, both of which are easy to sympathize with. They are not, however, justification for a senior officer killing his own men in cold blood so that they won't discover he's manipulated another country to invade the United States, specifically with the goal of killing as many civilians as possible.
• Nominally-Objectivist dictator Andrew Ryan of BioShock (series) is seen by some fans as a visionary who could do no wrong. No matter what your politics, you'd still have to ignore the fact that he went off the deep end and started murdering anyone who looked at him funny.
• Similar to Rorschach and Tyler Durden, some pre-teen fanboys need to be frequently reminded that the world does not need men like Kratos.
• Katawa Shoujo is an inversion; on hearing that a game about dating crippled girls (blind, amputees, etc) is being written by (mostly) refugees of The Imageboard That Must Not Be Named, many reviewers are prepared to find a depressingly cruel, mocking game on par with Rapelay, instead of a fairly realistic and touching game about living (and dating) with handicaps.
  • On the other hand, Word of God (word of the devblog, actually) has denied the opposite interpretation that the story is meant to be a sympathetic analysis of life with a handicap. The setting comes second to the genre (romance).
• In Mass Effect, Cerberus is on the dark side of morally gray. They're essentially a well-funded Knight Templar terrorist organization out to ensure that humanity dominates the galaxy—often resorting to cruel biological experiments on unwilling human test subjects. In the sequel, they bring the protagonist Back From the Dead and provide him/her with a Cool Ship to investigate the abduction of human colonists while the established Alliance and Citadel governments do little to assist—but it's made perfectly clear that they're using you to further their own agenda, and their past atrocities do not go unmentioned. This has not stopped many players from wondering what everyone has against Cerberus. As with Avatar's Col. Quaritch, however, many people seem to actually agree with the "secure-human-dominance-at-any-cost" mindset, so this is not entirely surprising.
  • In fact, one could make a very good argument that the twist in the Overlord DLC was meant to hammer into the misaimed heads that, yes, Cerberus is not good.
    • The problem with that is Overlord came out after everyone had completed the game, meaning players knew the geth were good guys all along. Without that, the decision at the end is more of a Sadistic Choice. One life in exchange for millions? A devastating war averted, but by Cerberus of all groups, who now control an entire sapient race? Good luck.
  • Part of the reason this comes up is that the Illusive Man labels his domination as "protection of human interests," and given the attitude of the alien Council at times, it's not hard to understand what he means. Also, it's Martin Sheen! How can you not trust Martin Sheen?
  • Of course, the real issue is just how evil Cerberus is. Are they Complete Monsters to a man, doing everything For the Evulz? Are they Well Intentioned Extremists, doing what they do because they believe it's the only way for humanity to survive in the galaxy? Or is it a mix of both? How many of their actions are justified, considering the state the galaxy finds itself in, with the Reapers on their doorstep?
  • And now with an in-universe example, revealed in Lair of the Shadow Broker. There exists a vid called Saren: A Hero Betrayed", which glorifies the turian Spectre who has not only been eagerly painted as the mastermind behind the geth attack on the Citadel, but is noted repeatedly to have been almost psychotically callous and ruthless even before he was indoctrinated by Sovereign. Anderson's response was to get drunk to blot out the memories of seeing it.
  • Then there is the small matter of the Citadel Council's rudeness. The way the Council speaks to Shepard in the first game, when first confronted with the evidence from Eden Prime, is exhasperating to the player who doesn't doubt any of Shepard's evidence, but from the point of view of the Council, Shepard sounds like a crazy conspiracy theorist. No one had seen a Reaper and the only evidence for their existence is Saren's recording (easily staged) and Shepard's vision. Saren's defense, when he is first accused of going rogue, is the quite reasonable and devastating, "Are we allowing dreams into evidence now?" If one strictly limits their point of view to that of the Citadel Council, Shepard comes off as a bit of an eccentric Ahab who sees the hands of the Reapers everywhere. Cerberus, meanwhile, agrees with what the player may know is true, but the rest of the galaxy does not have much reason to believe Shepard's story until the end of Mass Effect 2. It remains to be seen, given how easily Shepard could acquire damning evidence over the course of two, whether he/she will be given an Idiot Ball and be unable to prove his/her case early in 3.
    • The Council's response to Saren being accused of attacking Eden Prime was to launch an investigation into the matter. So they assigned one person to look into the attack, withheld all the information they had from him, didn't let him actually go to Eden Prime to gather information, and demanded results in less than a day. When he predictably turned up no conclusive evidence on the first day and requested more time to complete his investigation, they denied his request and declared that Saren couldn't have done it because "there isn't any evidence". The problem with the Council isn't that they don't believe Shepard, it's that they are purposely going out of their way to ignore everything Shepard says.
  • Inverted with the Council. Without the player's omniscient viewpoint, their actions make a lot more sense. While Shepard is taking for granted everyone should believe him just on his word. The council actually does help a great deal against Saren, especially with Virmire. On the other hand, Shepard is requesting they send a fleet into the Terminus Systems, which would provoke a full scale war, to find a magic artifact that will destroy the galaxy. Saren is also a manipulative bastard who loves feeding false information, which makes taking what he says at face value questionable. The Council was correct about reinforcing the Citadel, since Saren's plan was to attack it. The only point about Ilos they were incorrect on was they didn't realize a MacGuffin from there was required and that the Citadel was a mass relay.
• Fans of the Killzone games often complain of not being able to play the Helghast as protagonists, arguing that they were the true victims in the franchise. What they don't appear to realize is that this angle is a thinly veiled effort at playing up the Helghast analogy to Nazi Germany, of which had a legitimate claim to have been disproportionately punished after World War I, yet their actions in World War II hardly were justified.
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is HUGE with this trope due to Marche's actions and motivations in the game. He searches for a way to go back home to the real world and finds out the only way he could do it is convincing his friends to come home with him while abandoning everything that made their lives perfect in the fantasy world since they were using the said fantasy world to escape from their problems instead of facing them (Mewt is a prince and is no longer bullied, Ritz's hair is now naturally red, and Marche's brother, Donned, can actually walk when he wasn't able to back home). Many people view Marche as a complete villain for "destroying" a dream world (since that world stops existing when Marche and his friends all wish to go home) and making his brother become crippled again. Most people ignore that Donned accepted the fact that he can't walk again when he goes back home, Rtiz knowing that she would have to return home eventually and when she does go back, she accepts her natural white hair (which makes her mother happy to see her daughter be happy), and Mewt standing up to the bullies that bothered him in the beginning of the game. Despite these facts, many fans still believe Marche is a totally selfish boy that doesn't care what happens to his friends or his brother as long as he can go home, despite the fact that Marche convinced everyone why they need to go home. This is most likely the reason why Final Fantasy Tactics A2 made the main plot more simplified in order to avoid a controversial story.
• The Witcher, the second in the game in particular, has a rapidly developing misaimed fandom. It's a tricky case due to it's Grey and Gray Morality clouding things, the game does expect you to make rather murky moral decisions, and no side is all good, or all bad. But overall, there is a clear message that bigots are bad. The elvish rebels METHODS are criticized in the game, but it is made clear that the fact that they are discriminated against is not cool, and joining the non-humans is given as much weight as joining the pro-human factions. In fact, you get the best ending if you join Iorveth, the Scoia'tael leader. It is the ONLY way to lift the curse on Saskia, the (literal) dragon. Your other options are leaving her impaled on a tree, but alive, or kill her. Yet many fans agree with the strawman arguments put forth by the human characters in the game, and take the stance that the humans are always right by virtue of them being human (similar to Avatar's misaimed fandom), and should always take precedence over the non-humans in the game. They have also begun to drag real life prejudices in the game, by complaining when the developers do things to cater to fans who belong to a minority group, such as replacing textures on some brothel carpets which could offend some Muslims, or vehemently arguing against the inclusion of any form of homosexuality in the game, because apparently minorities should never be considered, despite the clear message saying otherwise in the game itself.
• Inverted in the 2005 Rockstar videogame adaptation of The Warriors. The game's depiction (which, naturally, takes many of its cues from the similar Grand Theft Auto) is arguably a more accurate rendering of Sol Yurick's original characters than the popular 1979 film based on the novel on which the game is ostensibly more directly based. Whereas in the movie the young hoodlums (except, of course, for Ajax, and even he is up to debate) come off at worst as misguided, put-upon orphans, and at best as Loveable Rogues. In the game, these same characters truly are criminals: ruthlessly pragmatic, frighteningly power-hungry, and have no qualms about mugging the innocent and outright murdering the guilty. (The game does conclude pretty much the same way the movie does, though, so maybe this is a straight example after all.)
• Dr. Breen in Half Life has his fans who think he did the right thing by assuring the survival of humanity by surrendering, except there are hints that he staged the entire Resonance Cascade for personal gain, and he is the one who insisted on the highly specific test requirements. Some of his comments in 2 as you climb up the Citadel are actually quite reasonable, so it is easy to see how this gets started. Of course, this is discounting how he's a borderline Card-Carrying Villain who mind controls the populace with tainted water and by all accounts is still playing the fate of humanity for his own personal stake in the Combine empire.
  • Of course, that only goes to show how big a Villain with Good Publicity, when even the player is fooled.
• Several people have said that they'd rather play the Shallow Parody of Mario Kart used in the commercial for Blur rather then the actual game. Apparently the game helped sales for Mario Kart too.
• In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, late into the game, the player must hunt down the Big Bad in his pocket dimension, Camoran's Paradise. At first, "Paradise" appears to be a beautiful Arcadian valley with flowers and meadows, but later, the player discovers that under this glade is a hellish cavern where Camoran, having made his fallen followers immortal, tortures traitors forever for betraying him. And if you're lucky enough to have been faithful to Camoran? He has monsters hunt you down and kill you, only for you to return and be hunted down again. The whole point of Camoran's Paradise is that it's meant to be a Crap Saccharine World that looks pleasant, but is really a horrible place to be. And yet, a lot of players can't look past the Scenery Porn and download Game Mods that let the player revisit Paradise and live there.
• Team Fortress 2 has an in-game example with the Soldier's speech about Sun Tsu, which begins with the quote "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight!" As is mentioned in the Misaimed Fandom/Literature section, Sun Tsu advocated only fighting as a last resort; in fact, the original quote, in context, is something along the lines of "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then, no matter what is said by the political leaders, you must fight; and, if fighting is sure to result in defeat, then no matter what is said by the same political leaders, you must not fight.
• Type Moon works are heavily subjected to this.
  • One theme that the head writer, Nasu, loves is the idea that we all have darkness within ourselves. You get a little agitated when you think of something thoughtless that your friend did years ago, you feel that the girl that you like should have gone with you instead of him, you have an old grudge towards one of your relatives, your acquaintances all have little flaws that annoy you, etc., but you keep it under wraps, because you realize that you're being irrational or petty, or that its just insignificant next to your love for this person. But what happens when you're possessed by a supernatural power and forced to act on all of your dark urges? Suffice to say, none of us would be good people. Nasu has used this with no less than four characters, and two of them have hatebases that center their bashing around said character's actions while in this state, despite the fact that they would never behave that way normally, and even after Nasu had spent the better part of the story beating them over the head with the concept.
  • Tsukihime fandom often fails to understand Kohaku's character, despite it being spelled out in black and white. She masked her emotions and detached herself from the world around her in response to being abused as a child. She took on the cheerful persona in response to her formerly cheerful sister becoming mopey and reserved. Her cheerful personality gradually became her real one without her realizing it. The Kohaku that we see is the real one. She formulated a plan to get the Tohnos to kill each other not because she was pissed (remember that she was detached by this point), but because she thought that it was what a normal person would do. She is not a vengeful sadist who would randomly murder your family because she likes seeing you squirm.
• Tales of Vesperia: The "Yuri is evil" crowd. Yuri would have loved nothing more than for Flynn's methods to work, and he's clearly shown trying to let the system do its job. The result? A sadistic high up aristocrat who partakes in recreational torture and murder promptly gets let off with a slap on the wrist, since the ones who were judging him had no desire to lock up and/or execute one of their own. The implications were that he would basically be back to where he was before eventually, except maybe a little more in the background. If Yuri had let him go, he might have done so on the heads of innocent civilians. Likewise with his later kill, where it WOULD have been on the heads of innocent civilians if he hadn't done what he did. In that government, the law was truly the tool of those that held power, and those that held power weren't the nicest people. Yuri was anything but evil, or in the wrong.
  • Vesperia is more more complicated than that. The game's full Japanese title includes the subtitle "To Enforce 'Justice,' " and the game constantly asks whether any given character's methods of enforcing that "Justice" are right. Yuri's murders aren't exactly presented in a kindly light. He's hardly evil, but he didn't handle the situation well. That's the point- Flynn's government is crippled and ineffectual due to outer interests, but Yuri's succumbing to vigilantism. He's essentially taking his first steps on the way to taking Duke's brutal "Take the Law Into My Own Hands and Kill Anyone I See As Evil" path. Neither form of "Justice" is supported in the games, with the game's proposed correct path being represented by the Guilds and the Don.