Draco in Leather Pants/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Lampshaded in Miracleman with the "Bateses", a subculture that identifies itself with the supervillain Kid Miracleman/Johnny Bates. This idolization occurs after Bates personally murders most of London and the surrounding countryside in grotesque and grisly fashion. We're talking grade-A Nightmare Fuel here, easily. This is likely a parody of real-life skinheads and Neo-Nazis, who became popular in Britain and greater Europe a generation or so after WWII.
  • Jhonen Vasquez seems to have an accidental habit of making these: His first creation, Johnny C from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, has an insane amount of fangirls (usually among the Gothic, Hot Topic-loving crowd) who claim that he's just misunderstood and lonely. They seem to overlook that Johnny is schizophrenic, psychotic, sociopathic, and Ax Crazy; that he killed an entire restaurant full of people because someone said he "looked wacky"; he has entire torture chambers in his Torture Cellar that contain who-knows-how-many people; he tried to murder the one girl who really liked him and drove her to become a recluse and hide in her apartment almost 24/7 out of paranoia; and he has killed numerous people for various insane reasons. Interestingly enough, Jhonen does portray Johnny as a sympathetic character a few times in the comics; and Johnny does live in a Crapsack World.
    • To get into even weirder territory, one-shot character Jimmy has a surprising number of fans who adore him (and some pair him up with Nny). They ignore that Jimmy killed people to imitate Johnny's "murderous style" and to get his attention. Not only that, but he was the person who brutally raped and killed a cheerleader, which crime Johnny was accused of in an earlier issue. And there's also Johnny's distaste for Jimmy and what he's done:

"You fucking idiot!! Admire me?!! You shit!!! I'm the villain in this fucking story!"

    • It doesn't help that Nny's target audience consists predominantly of Goths and similar "outcasts" marginalized by mainstream culture; and that most (though certainly not all) of those who Johnny kills are the crapsack people known for bullying, ostracising, and otherwise tormenting the "freaks" who make up the majority of Vasquez's pre-Invader Zim fans. Nny lampshades this in one killing spree by announcing the various "sins" of his victims as he's killing them; this spree was triggered by a Jerkass bystander offhandedly referring to him as a "fag". Nny has no qualms about killing innocent bystanders, but many fans seem to miss that detail. The only person who seems safe from the Nny's murderous psychosis is Squee, who is himself portrayed as an embryonic Johnny, due to his crapsack parents and crapsack life. The Squee spinoff series strongly supports this interpretation.
    • As noted below, Vasquez's work (including Invader Zim) seems to inspire it, and he always seems mystified and disdainful of it, even sneering at how fans like stupid, violent, or just plain loser characters. He ignores that it's really no one's fault but his own as everything he does is set in a Crapsack World that couldn't possibly be taken seriously anyway, the people the fans like are a Villain Protagonist often with their name on the cover (are we supposed to pick up each new issue/watch each new episode just to assure ourselves that no, we still don't like them?), their personalities are strange and quirky in a way that only works in fiction, and their most visible victims are always extremely unsympathetic. Jhonen is either alarmingly unaware of what he himself is writing, or he's trying to have his moral high horse-shaped cake and eat it too.
  • Ragamuffin from Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl gets this treatment from fangirls who claim that he's so cute when he's a rag doll and that he is hot when he's in his human-vampire form. The first animated episode in which he appears features him eating a girl alive. Probably the Heel Face Turn he does for Lenore convinced the fans to consider him one of the most likeable characters in the comics.
    • Imagine you have a teddy bear or a cute plushie that you carry around all day. Now, what if that plushie has a life on its own, and it's a mysterious young guy who protects you from bad things? What if that guy is a good-looking vampire? For some, this may be Nightmare Fuel; for others, this is pure Fetish Fuel.
  • Doctor Doom has received treatment of this nature from the fans. He is a complex Evil Overlord with a strong (if warped) sense of nobility and a tendency towards frequent Badass Awesome Moments. But some create an exaggerated ideal of how noble and benevolent he is, leading to some of his fans forgetting that he's still supposed to be the villain. His vanity, insecurity, egomania, and brutality tend to be underplayed or ignored by these fans. As such, he can often get reduced to a benevolent but misunderstood genius who only wants to take over the world because he knows what's best for all of humanity. He is notoriously scarred and disfigured, and so his fan-worship is based more on his Badass nature than his looks -- although some tellings of the tale underplay the scarring he received). Writers who attempt to stress Doom's less-attractive qualities can be rejected vitriolically.
    • The image of 'Doom as benevolent dictator' partially stems from a one-off book, Emperor Doom, in which Doom manages to conquer the Earth and begins to make numerous improvements in how things are run; this book is often used to reinforce the impression that Doom would be a great and benevolent leader if he managed to take over. It's worth noting that he manages this largely by brainwashing the entire planet into accepting his rule (goodbye, freedom of thought and dissent); and he ultimately gives it up and lets the heroes defeat him because he gets bored, suggesting that he's ultimately not as interested in 'making the world a better place for all' as many would like to think.
      • By this point in the timeline readers have seen Doom attain godlike power multiple times, and literal omnipotence twice. The results have varied from 'Doom gives up questing after more power to try and concentrate on mastery of self', 'the power drives Doom insane and he yields it up rather than break', and 'Doom honestly tries to save the universe from an existential threat, even if he also appoints himself its benevolent dictator in the process'. Outside of also using his godpowers to smite the Fantastic Four to death most of the times he gets them, Doom's record re: running amok with a sudden infusion of nigh-omnipotence is only slightly worse than the average superhero's.
    • Doom's heroic villain-type schemes are frequently used to test the convictions of the heroes and to increase the story complexity; thus, this one isn't surprising.
  • Venom and Carnage from Spider-Man. Made worse that the alien symbiotes' "costumes" are emotionally striking in very different ways to different people.
  • In general, many of the iconic comic book villains (The Joker, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, etc.) receive so much love from the fans that they're no longer these wicked, irredeemable people you're supposed to root against. Nowadays, people root for some of these villains just as much as they do the heroes, if not moreso. And when said fans start Running the Asylum...
    • Um, Doom-love I've seen, but the Joker and Luthor no longer wicked and supposed to be rooted against? Sounds like this so-called "people" you mention who root for them and would run the asylum if they could is a grand congregation of one, dude.
      • There are Joker fangirls, especially after the movie.
      • Smallville contributed a lot of Luthor fangirls to the online community.
    • It definitely hasn't helped any that the Marvel Universe's hero community started getting Darker and Edgier. In a world where Tony Stark spent a couple years earning the Fan Nickname 'Der Eisenfuhrer' and Cyclops currently leads a black ops kill squad going around assassinating 'enemies of the mutant race', some fans tend to get a little cynical over who allegedly has the moral high ground on who.
      • The ironic thing is, ever since Civil War and House of M, Tony Stark's popularity has exploded among the fangirls. Granted, this may have something to do with the release of The Movie, but the seemingly insane fannishness predates even that...but not by much, since while he was always popular before Civil War, he was a relatively obscure figure compared to the household names of the X-Men and Spider-Man. So yeah...
    • As for Magneto... folks, as much as I hate to say it, is he actually wrong about Marvel humanity and what it will do to the mutant population if it ever gets the chance? When he originally entered the picture he was clearly supposed to be a paranoid relic of the past who was letting his own tragic personal history strongly color his worldview to the point where he could not believe anything but the worst of his fellow man, justified or not. But since then, the general population of Earth-616 has done everything possible to actually live down to Magneto's expectations, up to and including reacting to the peaceful founding of a mutant homeland by nuking it. Twice. Governments cheerfully embrace ethnic cleansing strategies and the worst forms of illegal experimentation, no one is ever brought to account for it, fringe religious cults and militias openly dedicate themselves to anti-mutant pogroms and genocide and mutants have to fight them themselves because the authorities can't be arsed to, it just goes on and on. Civil War even had the general population starting to treat all superhumans the way mutants have been treated for decades in publication. For some of us, it is genuinely a struggle at this point to remember why Magneto is supposed to be the villain. Things like this is why Grant Morrison felt it necessary to write stories where Magneto went Ax Crazy and massacred innocents for no rational reason... and even then, those had to be rapidly retconned away because the fandom simply would not accept it.
    • In the story "Mad Love," Harley Quinn was obviously believing this in-story about The Joker before her own descent into madness.
    • Lex Luthor has gotten some love ever since Lex Luthor: Man of Steel (well, mostly since), which tells a Superman story from his point of view and sees him rationalise his actions as Beware the Superman, with Lex seeing himself as the Only Sane Man on Earth who sees that humanity is becoming dependant on an untrustworthy, godlike alien whose mere presence will ultimately result in a stagnating and static civilization as nothing innovators like him create would be worth a jot next to the hero. Adding to the contrast is Superman rescuing the Toyman from an angry mob after he blew up a daycare centre and doing other things that were making him a Hero with Bad Publicity. However, the fans who side with him on this for his apparant humanist sympathies tend to overlook the fact that everything that happened in the story- including the daycare centre bombing- was secretly his doing and part of a grander plan to discredit and humiliate Superman- that he really does believe himself to be the hero doesn't make him good, it just makes him batshit insane. Not to mention that, for all his supposed humanism, he is ultimately a bigger threat to humanity than Superman ever would be -- he certainly has a lot more of them killed throughout the story.
      • Furthermore, there are several points in DC continuity -- continuity, not Elseworlds! -- where we see what Luthor does during periods of time when Superman has been absent for a prolonged period, with every reason to believe that said absence will be permanent. And the answer is? Be an even worse person than normally. For all of Lex's claims that he could cure cancer and improve the world and yadda yadda yadda if only Superman wasn't around, he sure doesn't act like it when Superman ain't around.
  • Rorschach from Watchmen gets some of this from the fandom despite being a seriously disturbed hero rather than a villain to begin with, and it doesn't help that it actually is seriously suggested by his canon that he could have turned out differently had his life been better. That doesn't make it any less strange that a short, homely, brutal, canonically smelly vigilante has been made into a cute little innocent tsundere.
    • This also happens to Ozymandias a lot. Due to his noble intentions, there were some people who were willing to rationalize his deeds even after his mass murder
    • This tendency was parodied in How Do You See Rorschach?
  • The Juggernaut has been the victim of this since Chuck Austen got a hold of him. Despite being a mass-murderer, a terrorist (he did destroy one of the WTC towers) and a sociopath who cares nothing for all the death and destruction he has caused. Who mainly concerns himself with his own gratification. You get one writer who portrays him as not having killed anyone on purpose and is just a misunderstood bully. Then people come out of the wood work to explain his actions. Going so far as to say him not actively doing something evil is proof of his heroic qualities that were there the whole time.
    • Despite the fact that his heroic days were only a few years running and the changes have since been undone for years. Many fans and even writers still don't consider him to be a true villain. But rather someone who doesn't know if he is bad or good. Keep in mind the power of The Juggernaut is shown to be evil and it makes you want to do bad things.
    • Other writers well before Austen had portrayed the Juggernaut as having, at the least, some Noble Demon moments. The character has almost as long a history as the X-Men themselves, so picking and choosing incidents to make him either an Anti-Villain or a Complete Monster is tainting characterization anyway.
  • Madelyne Pryor, the clone of Jean Grey, gets this as well. Part of it may be thanks to her initial portrayal as a strong-willed, capable woman, with an entire story arc set to establish that she was in fact not the reincarnation of the person she looked like (author's original intent notwithstanding). Part of it is definitely due to the abandonment by her husband to lead another superhero team with said lookalike on it. Either way, people like to focus on the Woman Scorned aspect of her characterization and not look at the part where a Drunk on the Dark Side Maddie threatened the life of half a dozen innocent children...Including her own.
  • Wolverine's son Daken gets a lot of this, even though he kills his lovers (both men and women) for shits and giggles. Doesn't help that his justification is his father's absence from his life. Fans who identify with his misplaced rage against said father, or the position said father fills on his team, or maybe just like the idea of a bisexual version of their favorite Badass, flock to him in throngs.
    • It Got Worse. In the first issue of his new ongoing it's strongly suggested that Daken raped a female asassian sent to kill him. Fandom has broken into three parts - those who deny it saying he just mocked her before delivering the killing blow, those who are disgusted by it and those saying that she deserved it.
  • Dark Reign also gave Bullseye and Mac Gargan(Venom) fangirls, thanks to the Ho Yay they had with Daken. For that matter, the Dark Avengers as a whole got this treatment from fans and Dark Avengers was a popular book. Hell, some fans say Norman Osborn did a better job as "top cop" than Iron Man.
  • Brian Azzarello was surprised and disturbed to find that the violent, amoral homicidal rapist and torturer Lono had a devoted fan following. There are Lono fangirls. That's right: Lono. Fangirls.
  • Willy Pete from Empowered becomes an in-universe example of this after a video of him massacring (and in some cases raping) nearly a dozen superheroes leaks to the internet. People begin drawing yaoi doujinshi of him and the heroes he either injured, raped, or killed. Even another female superhero speaks well of him and adoringly downloads the doujinshi, brushing off his atrocities by saying that she didn't like the personalities of those he raped and killed anyway.
  • While not evil, the Batman fandom seems quite eager to whitewash Jerkass Woobies Jason Todd and Damian Wayne. Jason, while not without reason, was the main antagonist in Battle for the Cowl. While some may disagree with writer Tony Daniel's reasoning behind it, some are going as far to say he should have been Batman while Dick Grayson shouldn't. This despite the fact he was a Gun Trotting Batman in the mini series and he willingly killed before that. The very thing the original would never have stood for. The fact that he was voiced by Jensen Ackles in the Under the Red Hood movie likely playing a part in it too. Damian meanwhile has undergone character development but some of the fanart draws too much attention to the fact that he is ten and not that he got Training from Hell. He has killed a man and even very nearly killed Tim Drake before becoming Robin.
    • Holy shit does Jason Todd get this. Many, many fangirls are completely willing to overlook or "justify" the fact that he has brutally murdered people by saying that his victims deserved it or that he just needs a hug because he's just so cute and troubled! Fans get outraged whenever it's suggested, in-universe or out, that he should maybe be punished for his crimes. Because it's totally not his fault he picked that gun up and put a bullet in that dude's skull.
  • In the DCnU reboot, The Joker becomes an in-universe example after he disappears leaving only his face behind while Batman suffers in-universe Ron the Death Eater treatment. Suddenly Gothamites think Joker is a sympathetic murder victim and Batman is a heartless murderer who needs to be brought to justice.
  • A very...unusual form of this happens with Loki. While he certainly has a lot of fangirls, a lot of people tend to ignore his more heinous acts in the comics by the fact that he's not nearly that much of an asshole in the original mythology, and was basically turned into a villain by years of translations and adaptations that ignored his positive traits and played up his negative ones. There's a large number of people who dislike this, and complain about the fact Loki is sometimes depicted as being a Card-Carrying Villain. Ironically, Stan and Jack did write some issues based on actual stories which had Loki in a much more positive light, being based before he turned on Thor.
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