Unintentionally Sympathetic/Unsympathetic Characters

[Castle Bleck 19,361]

Sympathetic:

Marine Sandwich (Friends Forever #1), and the Rancor and its handler (Return Of The Jedi).

 

Unsympathetic:

Patroklos (SoulCalibur V).

Edited April 25, 2023 by Castle Bleck

[cmarston1 5,959]

Unintentionally unsympathetic would have to go to Starlight Glimmer from the season 5 finale.

Her backstory was really really really weak, and I still can't believe just how fast she was forgiven for major human right violations.

[MLPFanatic34 3,234]

Definitely Angelica from the Rugrats before she matured.

[Odd Ball 231]

Unintentionally unsympathetic would have to go to Starlight Glimmer from the season 5 finale.

Her backstory was really really really weak, and I still can't believe just how fast she was forgiven for major human right violations.

I think you mean major pony right violations.

[Widdershins 9,959]

I'll pick Unintentionally Sympathetic for One Hundred, Mr.Trebek!

 

I'd have to go with that old guy in the oil well stores in Waterworld.  Now, I don't fully remember all of that movie, as even I have limits to how much I'm willing to test my madness levels. But the villain ( or one of the villains, I dunno!) was obsessed with how much oil he had, so he kept some poor, scraggly old man down in the storage tank who's sole purpose was to constantly keep an exact measurement of how many inches of oil the guy had whenever someone opened the hatch to holler down at him. At some point in the incomprehensible mess of that movie, someone threw some fire down that oil bin, and as the flames quickly rush to end this old man's torment of a boring, dark & dank miserable life he utters the last of his, what, two lines with a simple: "Hoh, thaink God."

And Yes, I did steal this idea entirely from a Cracked.com YouTube video. Arrrrtistic License!

[Castle Bleck 19,361]

Unsympathetic:

King Aspen (Root Of The Problem comics).

 

P.S.:

Thank God for Blackthorn, though.

Edited April 25, 2023 by Castle Bleck

[PoisonClaw 8,164]

I don't know if it was unintentional or not, but Heart from Kamen Rider Drive was the most sympathetic character in the show, and he was the leader of the bad guys, a race of robots called Roidmudes who wanted to rule over humans. He cared about all his comrades, mourning them whenever they were defeated and actually yelled at one of his generals for treating them like cannon fodder. 

[Widdershins 9,959]

Well, finding sympathetic characters are a lot easier for me, what can I say, I'm a bleedin' heart! Hmm, let me start this off with Unintentionally Unsympathetic then.

 

  Ash Ketchem & Red from Pokemon. Now, sure, I haven't watched EVERY pokemon episode, but never liked Ash. I know he's supposed to be bland enough for the kids to imagine they're him, but its kind of hard to root for a guy who has to literally be told everything. And the vast majority of the time he gets his badges from just helping out in a crises or a chance hit; that's not how this works, buddy, we've got rules set down for this kind of thing!

   And Red is a complete non-entity. I for one am not going to get excited for him making a cameo in a newer generation game when all we have to go on for him is his simplistic design.

 

As for sympathetic: Primordius, a raid boss from Warcraft.

  So, bit of backstory. He's a Saurok, well technically. The original one of them. See, Sauroks are lizard people. Some bigger, rockier race designed & made them out of... magicky hoohah a great long time ago for the sole purpose of making slave labor out of them. Of course, since then their captors kinda bit it & went the way of the history books... for a while anyhow, you know how it is with video game baddie races. But the majority of Sauroks went wild and are living a decent, but feral life. Not so with Primoridus.

   See, with a race you make out of vats of goopy stuff, you need a control group, a sort of original mock-up project. A guy that was the original product that you haul out to take a look at, chop him up, reform him, see what you can work on or improve, then toss him back down into the remaining dregs of that vat. Time... and time... after time... after time again.

   That was Primordius's life, just sitting at the bottom of the Saurok-making room, literally stewing in his own juices for thousands of years. Never having anyone ever treat him as anything other than literally disposable parts. And he can't die technically either. He'll just seep back into the vat again, reform into another saurok, his memories intact, each time getting more & more mutated.

    When you encounter him, his face is so swollen over you can barely see where his face & eyes are. In fact, that's what the fight is; you getting in the way of him channeling the magical energies that "heal" him by way of making him strong enough to repel your attacks, spew spines or elsewhile evolve. Throughout the fight he refers to you, the ones that come from outside, as "The Perfect Ones" and fears what else you want to take from what little he has. In fact, he doesn't really even get in your way, he just stares at you from the shadows & only attacks if you run up to stab him.

    All his endless life Primordius has been nothing more than meat. What do you, the brave adventurer do? You smack him around, loot him for your gear so that you can be tougher and go tackle the Big Bad Zappypants dude that actually is threatening the world. You move on, forget him, toss him back into the vat, so he can stew for another thousand years. Sure, it may be a bit emo & exaggerated, but I feel he's a good analogy for depression. Every now and again, we all fall into our own vats to stew in, that we can't seem to crawl back out of. I can't listen all the way through his voice clips without crying.                       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dztI4VhawSo

 

  "The pain... it begins again... it tears at us from the inside..."

                        Well... maybe that's the bright side there. Now that your rampage has left everyone else in the castle dead, maybe now that Primordius has outlived his captors, he can finally go outside for his first breath of fresh air...

[nolongerabout 403]

I felt sympathy for Tuco from The good, the Bad and the Ugly. He's a cad, a thief, a murderer, but has such character it's impossible to dislike him, especially when you learn why he is like he is. As he says to his brother, "You think you're better than I am? Where we came from, if one did not want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit! You chose your way, I chose mine. Mine was harder. You became a priest because you were... too much of a coward to do what I do!"

[Denim&Venöm 19,027]

As a wrestling fan, I've come across this a lot. WWE have the bad habit of making their villains compelling and their heroes into either generic cheesy boy scouts, or morally ambiguous anti-heroes. 

 

Like back in 2011. The evil sadistic cult leader CM Punk halted 'good guy' The viper, Randy Orton from getting the world championship. You see, the year prior, Randy turned against his entitled proteges and struck out on his own, becoming a good guy. Or rather, becoming a bad guy who did bad things to other bad guys. He portrays the stoic, calculating, sadistic sociopath who uses haneous tactics on the WWE's villians. That and he looks like an abercrombie & finch model chiseled out of granite, and he's a third generation performer born and bred by the company, so he has to be the good guy, right? 

 

But a few years prior, the roles were reversed. CM Punk was the young rebellious up and comer in his first run as world champ, and Randy was the veteran leader of a group of entitled 2nd generation stars. They attacked him backstage, and Punk lost his championship due to injury. Now years later, Punk vowed that as long as he and Randy were on the same show, Randy would never get to be world champ. 

 

So the guy who cost another man his championship thanks to an underhanded sneak attack is now the good guy? And somehow the victim of his assault is treated as the one in the wrong?  

[ChocolateCrane 156]

Unintentionally sympathetic:

 

Tirek from Twilight's Kingdom part's 1&2

 

Unintentionally Unsympathetic:

 

Gloriosa Daisy from EQG: Legend of the Everfree

[heavens-champion 1,905]

Tai lung counts. They probably shouldn't have shown him as a kid.

[Castle Bleck 19,361]

On 3/24/2017 at 3:38 PM, Denim&Venom said:

As a wrestling fan, I've come across this a lot. WWE have the bad habit of making their villains compelling and their heroes into either generic cheesy boy scouts, or morally ambiguous anti-heroes. 

 

Like back in 2011. The evil sadistic cult leader CM Punk halted 'good guy' The viper, Randy Orton from getting the world championship. You see, the year prior, Randy turned against his entitled proteges and struck out on his own, becoming a good guy. Or rather, becoming a bad guy who did bad things to other bad guys. He portrays the stoic, calculating, sadistic sociopath who uses haneous tactics on the WWE's villians. That and he looks like an abercrombie & finch model chiseled out of granite, and he's a third generation performer born and bred by the company, so he has to be the good guy, right? 

 

But a few years prior, the roles were reversed. CM Punk was the young rebellious up and comer in his first run as world champ, and Randy was the veteran leader of a group of entitled 2nd generation stars. They attacked him backstage, and Punk lost his championship due to injury. Now years later, Punk vowed that as long as he and Randy were on the same show, Randy would never get to be world champ. 

 

So the guy who cost another man his championship thanks to an underhanded sneak attack is now the good guy? And somehow the victim of his assault is treated as the one in the wrong?  

Which made it unintentionally satisfying when Punk (kayfabe-)injured Orton's leg to keep him from Punting. About time someone thought to do that.

Edited April 25, 2023 by Castle Bleck

[Theautisticrebel 305]

Unintentionally Sympathetic:

Jimmy Osgood (yes I know what he did could count as a moral event horizon, but I can't help but think he still has some good in him)

Cozy Glow (I can't help but believe that her punishments that she received were too much)

Unintentionally unsympathetic:

Starlight Glimmer (I like her but, her backstory was really petty)

Walter White (Do you really think that I would sympathize with him after literally admitting that everything he did was to fuel his own ego)

Cassandra (I'll let this video explain)

 

[Megas 27,653]

Unintentionally sympathetic:

During the Summer of Punk.

Chris Jericho during his 2009 feud with Shawn Michaels

[Dreambiscuit 9,795]

Some examples off the top:

Sympathetic would be Dr. Henry Wu from the Jurassic Park movies. Everyone made him out to be an evil scientist out to destroy the world with his dinosaur creations, but he’s just a scientist doing what scientists do. He applies his genius to pushing the envelope of his field of endeavor.

Unsympathetic will have to go to James Bond in the last movie No Time To Die. I should give a crap because it’s James bond, but Daniel Craig is no James Bond and that movie was no James Bond movie. I was glad to see that end the way it ended.

[TheRockARooster 51,362]

3 minutes ago, Dreambiscuit said:

Some examples off the top:

Sympathetic would be Dr. Henry Wu from the Jurassic Park movies. Everyone made him out to be an evil scientist out to destroy the world with his dinosaur creations, but he’s just a scientist doing what scientists do. He applies his genius to pushing the envelope of his field of endeavor.

Unsympathetic will have to go to James Bond in the last movie No Time To Die. I should give a crap because it’s James bond, but Daniel Craig is no James Bond and that movie was no James Bond movie. I was glad to see that end the way it ended.

Thank you, Dreamy. 

I agree with that.

[Castle Bleck 19,361]

Speaking of unintentionally sympathetic wrestlers, Test (R.I.P.) during The Invasion.

We were supposed to see him as a "turncoat" for joining The Alliance… Except that it was after some of his fellow WWF attacked him on a mere hunch that he was a mole (who turned out to be Paul Heyman); if anything, they betrayed him.

[Megas 27,653]

Since I've been binging on Star Fox lately, but my answer for unsympathetic is Krystal from Command in a mix of a lack of focus, Other M levels of bad writing and bad localization. Game starts with Fox forcing her off the team for her safety which is a really bad reason(screw Falco, Slippy and Peppy I guess), Obviously she doesn't take it very well, and I know they want you to feel sorry for her, but a lot of choices she makes(depending on the route you take) really makes you second guess because a lot of decisions make her come across as excessive, spiteful, and hilarious petty(joining Star Wolf, dating Panther to spite Fox, etc.,) and she herself is just really mean throughout certain routes, humiliating Fox or snapping at some of the characters who really didn't deserve it.

I've heard the justification for this is that this was done because it was her wanting to prove herself, and like, that's great and all, that actually sounds it would have been awesome. Problem is that isn't what happened, it isn't what we got, instead we just got a pissed off ex and poorly written romances and drama. And it's a shame because it's the one game that tried to do more with her, and there are moments I do like that just got overshadowed. As much as I dislike her on Star Wolf, her interactions with Wolf himself are great, I like her friendship with the Hare's, I like here 1 on 1 with Slippy in the Ending 1 route, and as cheesy and corny as it was, I really like the mission where she gathers all the female pilots and leads a defense of Corneria in a display of girl power. Cliched? Sure, but it's also cute and fun, it's one of the few endings in the game that's happy, you can make a sequel to Command with this ending with zero consequences, and it's probably the only route in the game where Krystal feels like Krystal

Edited October 1, 2023 by Megas