Strawman Has a Point

"You can't have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense."

An author sets up a Straw Character, or some other kind of straw-man argument. The author attempts to demolish said man of straw. And then, sometimes later, sometimes right away, the reader realizes that the strawman has a point; that is, the straw-man argument is not as weak as the author intended it to be, sometimes to the point of being better than the "correct" argument.

This may be caused by Creator Provincialism, Not Doing the Research, or just plain bad writing. It has also been known to result from Values Dissonance, in the case of works written in a culture/era different from that of the audience (e.g. "strawman" arguments against things like racism), or from the audience and the work falling at very different places on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism (see example from which the Ebert page quote was drawn, but also almost any instance where a work promotes love, faith, emotion, etc. over logic and depicts the logicians as "the bad guys").

For those who are wondering "Is a straw man with a good argument still a straw man?", the answer is "Usually." The point in question is presented as bad, the audience is supposed to see it as bad, but the writer failed to consider that it might be a lot more reasonable than it's actually depicted. The straw man can still have stereotypical, oversimplified arguments, they're simply more convincing than the author wanted them to be. If gone too far, it can result in actively rooting for the bad guys over the good.

Occasionally, it happens in a reverse manner when the side the author intended to be right loses credibility because their own arguing techniques or methods are worse than they intended. This is especially common in depictions of hearings/legal proceedings, where the "hero" talks out of turn, refuses to obey decorum or consider the validity of the other side, makes logically-fallacious arguments that appeal to emotion and in general insists that their point is so important they can screw whatever rules or procedures they regard as a hindrance to getting their point across.

And sometimes the author did in fact do their work on their opponent's position and presented the opposite viewpoint in a favorable light... then failed to present a similar argument for the side they supported, usually because they thought that their position was a priori right and/or didn't need much explaining. This has the side effect of creating a reverse strawman (ironman?). Death of the Author or Word of God on what the moral was supposed to be usually reveals this. Machiavelli's The Prince is the textbook example of this, though he might have just been penning satire.

In rare cases this can be a deliberate choice and the author might confirm after the fact that the audience was indeed meant to see the words of the straw man as having a grain of truth. When applied to old works, it can at times be the result of viewers Flanderizing a character in retrospect due to Values Dissonance.

Note: This trope is in play only when there is an actual Strawman involved, ie the argument is presented as completely wrong despite realistic arguments in the other direction. The argument may be simply weak or suggests a Slippery Slope Fallacy without actually being strawman. It does not require that the character be flat, a Villain or the underlying issues to be completely black and white. An antagonist may have sympathetic motives and sound arguments to explain their reasons to make the audience think about which side is right or wrong, which only hits this trope when they kill the debate by Jumping Off the Slippery Slope (e.g. in Act Two, learning that not only do they want to register all mutants, but they also want to kill them). If two characters are arguing but both the arguments and the characters are presented as having their pros and cons, it isn't this trope. If the Straw Man character espouses a good point but either doesn't actually subscribe to it, or is using it to manipulate the people around them, see Hypocrite and Manipulative Bastard.

If the Strawman's points are taken up by fans, while conveniently ignoring canonical evidence and arguments against it, there is much potential for Draco in Leather Pants.

Contrast Jerkass Has a Point and Dumbass Has a Point, where the author deliberately has a non-credible character hit the nail on the head to make a point about something being so true that the Jerk Jock or The Ditz has to come and point it out. Compare Misaimed Fandom, which results when the bad guy really is wrong but the fandom misinterprets them as having validity. Some of these Strawmen may also qualify as a Designated Villain.

See also: Informed Wrongness, No Mere Windmill, Alternative Character Interpretation, Do Not Do This Cool Thing, Broken Aesop. Has some similarities to Affectionate Parody, if you think about it.

No Real Life Examples, Please

Examples of Strawman Has a Point include:

By Medium

• Anime & Manga
• Comics
• Fanfics
• Films
• Literature
• Live-Action Television
• Professional Wrestling
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other Examples by Medium

Advertising

• A commercial for Kleenex paper towels (in a tissue-like box and not on a roll) uses a split screen shot of a cloth hand towel and a box of their paper towels, and shows people pulling out towel after towel, and reusing the cloth towel. The implication is that the cloth towel is dirty and gross... but it really ends up making the paper towels look wasteful and environmentally unsound.
• A Russian ad against draft-dodging shows a guy playing videogames all day long in his mother's house while a masculine voice narrates how not joining the army will make you less cool. And if that's not enough, the ad ends with the guy's mother saying:

Mother: Why does he need to join the army anyway? He's a nice guy, he's got a better purpose than that!

• This trope led to one of the biggest advertising mishaps ever: "An unfair comparison between the Mustang and the Javelin." In this 1968 magazine ad, American Motors proudly compared their new Javelin to the Ford Mustang. Aside glossy photos of both cars, the sparse ad copy stressed laughably petty things like "the Mustang's thin blade bumpers don't photograph well" and "our Javelin lists for no more than the Mustang." And the Mustang just plain looked better. To make matters worse, AMC ran the same ad for their Ambassador (vs. the Rolls-Royce), the Rambler (vs. the popular Volkswagen bug), and two other cars. So not only did AMC spend millions of dollars on slick, effective ads that made their competitors' cars look better, they did so to their entire product line. See the Javelin ad here.

Music

• "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)":
  • By the Beastie Boys, is about as tongue-in-cheek as songs get — even if some listeners didn't recognize it as a joke. Its lyrics are essentially one big spoof of the attitudes of stereotypical young "rebels without a cause." However, the quintessential rebellious teen whom the song is sung from the perspective of does make one good point: "Your pops caught you smoking and he says 'No way;' that hypocrite smokes two packs a day." Statistically, children are definitely more likely to smoke if their parents do. It's not that the Beastie Boys are wrong to make fun of misbehaving children, but obviously they need to point out the bad parenting that leads children to misbehave, too.
  • Also, to further that point, the next verse is "I'll kick you out of my house if that's the clothes you're gonna wear, I'll kick you out of my home if you don't cut that hair. You're mom busts on in and says 'what's that noise?' Aw mom; you're just jealous! It's the Beastie Boys." So inadvertently, they end up removing all doubt that yes; the teen may be a bad boy but a big part of that is that his parents are stuck-up jerks who act like Moral Guardians but exhibit unhealthy behaviors themselves.

Tabletop Games

• Deliberately invoked in the VII sourcebook for Vampire: The Requiem. Wanting to kill bloodsucking monsters with easily exploitable supernatural powers is a perfectly justiable position, Greg Stolze and those other guys who wrote it reminds us.
• This is how Warhammer 40000, despite every faction being thoroughly unpleasant, falls into Black and Gray Morality territory instead of outright Evil Versus Evil most of the time, most of them having some good points and the Strawman With A Point changing depending on the viewpoint faction. For example, if the Imperium are the protagonists fighting against the Eldar, the Eldar are completely valid in their position that humans are destructive savages who have irrevocably screwed over the entire galaxy. Likewise, if the Eldar are the protagonists in this scenario, it's equally valid to point out that the Eldar are just as responsible for the threat of Chaos facing the galaxy, were too busy having violent hedonistic orgies when they could have done something about it, are more than happy to cause the death of billions of planets full of humans to further an unexplained ridiculously complex scheme, and, when it comes to backstabbing, always pulls the blade first.
• Mage: The Ascension had this pretty bad. The Technocrats were set up as a terrible conspiracy bent on destroying art and imagination and generally ruining the world. Except... they were responsible for every good thing that's happened to common people throughout history, from better farming to television. And they're also the only people who are organized and powerful enough to actually land a blow against the supernatural powers that be and saving countless people with their, admittedly harsh, actions.

Theatre

• A staple of the comedies of Aristophanes:
  • Is a contest or debate between representatives of traditional ideals and new ways of thought, with the new ones exposed as dangerous, and the traditional side proving decisively victorious. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately for the playwright's point, most of these debates consist of the supposedly sophistic side making a good argument which the traditional side dismisses out of hand as blasphemy, without making any intelligent counterarguments. Then people follow the wrong argument because it makes more sense (it's even lampshaded in Clouds) and bad things happen to them as a result.
  • That makes it sound like Aristophanes may have been parodying both sides, telling the people who he otherwise agreed with that "you can't just say 'that's blasphemy' because it doesn't address their appeal to the masses and rings hollow; you have to actually explain why they're wrong". It's like a religious person making fun of both Richard Dawkins and Jack Chick. The bad things that strike the followers of the new ways are Aristophanes' attempt to do just that.
• Moliere's Don Juan:
  • In what might be an Invoked Trope example of this, the play is ostensibly condemning its evil atheist Villain Protagonist and most of the other characters remark on how horrible a person Juan is, including his servant, Sganarelle. The thing is, Sganarelle is certainly no saint himself besides being too much of a coward to stop Juan, is happy to profit from Juan's evil actions. Thus, both contemporary audiences and modern ones tend to think that instead of validating the views of Moral Guardians, Sganarelle instead serves to make Don Juan's philosophy actually come across as better, and some of Moliere's contemporaries considered the play "diabolical" for this reason.
  • Quite a few plays from that time period revolve around what is essentially their version of Shock Rock — a Magnificent Bastard has a wonderful time doing all those things the Church says are so awful, and then at the end he gets dragged into Hell to appease the Moral Guardians with what is effectively an And That's Terrible ending.
• In Legally Blonde: Callahan points out that Enrique being flamboyant, effeminate, and knowing a lot about shoes does not automatically imply he is gay. He even sings a song about it — "Gay, or European?" in order to illustrate the difference. Callahan ends up sexually harassing Elle and thus being one of the bad guys. And Enrique did turn out to be gay. But Callahan is right that effeminate does not automatically equal gay.
• In Porgy and Bess, "It Ain't Necessarily So," which argues that sin is a nonissue since most of the Bible is probably false, is the primary Villain Song of a cocaine dealer and bootlegger who tries to trick the male lead into incriminating himself for (justifiable) murder, forcefeeds cocaine to the formerly addicted female lead, and blackmails her into moving up the coast with him. In the coming decades, it was taken up by numerous jazz and rock singers without a hint of irony.

Web Comics

• This Subnormality comic was probably intended as a massive Take That to professional sports, but it ruins it by making Brian the Brain seem like a whiny elitist and the other two characters intelligent guys who just enjoy turning him off and relaxing every now and then. In fact, "Take a break from intellectualism every now and then" is probably a better moral than "Watching sports will make you an idiot misogynistic racist homophobic criminal". It's just as easy to take the comic as intentionally arguing the former moral, rather than the latter. Rowntree himself commented that it could be interpreted either way, and the comic is meant to point out the "cognitive dissonance regarding hockey in particular".
• This Dinosaur Comics strip. Granted, it's not really clear that we're supposed to side with Utahraptor, but given that he is fairly consistently depicted as being smarter and more reasonable than T-Rex, having him argue a point which essentially boils down to "Hitler Ate Sugar" is somewhat jarring. On the other hand, it's also entirely likely that Utahraptor could simply be teasing him.
• In Jay Naylor's comic Original Life, the small girl Angelica was created as a strawman into which Naylor stuffed everything he hated, from politics to spirituality to musical taste. She's also widely considered the most likeable and sympathetic character in the strip since she seems to be one of the few characters that doesn't act like a complete Jerkass to everyone around her. For five months, she's been waging a campaign against the strip's Objectivist protagonists, and most reader reaction is rooting for her.
• In the Sonichu webcomic, several trolls are on trial for murdering a character. The trial is quickly derailed to have more to do about their respective webcomics, and one of the characters, stoned off his mind, complains about the author's lack of work ethic. There are several tirades about letting the author write as he wants, but the stoner was right. Not updating can be a serious detriment to the success of any franchise. Sadly, this was played dead serious (literally, as this was used as evidence for their executions), rather than lampshading the hell about the absurdity of it all.
• In Dumbing of Age, Billie propositioned Danny for casual sex and he turned her down. Misogynist Joe lectured him for "thinking he knows better than the girl about whether she wants to have sex", which is supposed to be misogynist. Billie actually said she might regret it later, which Danny, conveniently, never mentions to Joe.
  • Some readers said Billie wasn't exactly giving enthusiastic (verbal) consent. According to some standards, Danny had an moral obligation to refuse. There's also the implication that Danny's own discomfort with the situation doesn't matter.

Web Original

• Neopets: Xandra did have a legitimate point: the Faeries do comparatively little for Neopia, and yet everyone idolises and reveres them. However, her response was... well... not the right thing to do, shall we say.
• In Super Mario Bros Z, Shadow's arguing that they should leave Princess Peach in Bowser's hands while they instead focus on finding the last of the Chaos Emeralds and stopping Turbo Metal Sonic is used as an excuse for Sonic to call him out on how he's become more of an asshole since Mobius was destroyed. However, while he was a jerk in how he put it, Shadow did have a number of valid points:
  • Bowser is, particularly when it comes to Peach, practically a Harmless Villain. He kidnaps her all the time and would never harm her.
  • Bowser outright told them that he wouldn't hurt her and would wait for them to finish gathering the Chaos Emeralds to hand over as her ransom.
  • Turbo Metal Sonic, in contrast to Bowser, is a Complete Monster and an Omnicidal Maniac who will happily butcher his way across the Mushroom Kingdoms looking for the last Chaos Emeralds while they are distracted dealing with Bowser's umpteenth harmless kidnapping.
  • Once they have those last Chaos Emeralds, they can transform into a group of Super Mode versions of themselves and lay waste to Bowser's whole army in the blink of an eye, then track down Turbo Metal Sonic and tear him to scrapmetal.
    • Ultimately, while it was intended to show just how callous and fixated Shadow has become, it really does make more sense for the Mario Bros, Yoshi, Sonic, and Shadow to prioritize finding the Chaos Emeralds over saving Peach.

Other

• A somewhat famous example from Computer Science: "Worse is Better", a famous paper describing two methodologies of software development. The "New Jersey" methodology (called "Worse is better", thus giving the paper it's name) is purposefully set up as a strawman, to contrast with the approach the author was trained in, the "MIT Approach" (called "The Right Thing" methodology); and yet, it turns out to be "better" at certain things, even in strawman form. Acknowledging this fact is part of the point of that section of the paper.
• Most Robot War stories want us to sympathize with the humans. But in most every case, the humans started it, and the robots are defending themselves, if being extreme about it.
• In almost any given story where the hero argues that If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him, the point of the opposing side — usually that the ends justify the means and that taking one murderous life to save many innocent ones is nothing like taking many innocent lives for selfish reasons — will come off as this to a fair amount of people.
• Conversed in a criticism of the Straw Feminist trope by Feminist Frequency. Anita Sarkeesian noted that while most such characters are portrayed as being always wrong, many of the actual points they made are perfectly valid, and points out that many of the writers of such characters seem to confuse real feminism with "female supremacy".
• The Epicurean trilemma is probably a forgery by Christian philosophers who were unhappy with some of his other ideas (like Cessation of Existence and ataraxia), since it first shows up in anti-Epicurean/anti-Stoic works written under Constantine and doesn't quite fit with the theology of Hellenistic Athens. 1400 years later, Hume felt Epicurus, well, had a point, and "his" presentation of the problem of evil has since been a fixture in works attacking the idea of a single, benevolent God.

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