[Rare Trope] A story element that popularized a concept is actually the polar opposite of that concept

[u/DiveSideways]

Some franchises start off a bit specialized and evolve into something else later. Some stories get warped by pop culture and burdened with misconceptions. Some stories just don't make sense, or send the wrong message on accident.

Not these!

No, these examples are very clear (and not retconned) and yet pop culture has done a complete 180-degree turn on understanding them.

1. Romeo and Juliet routinely gets alluded to as though it's a classic love story. In fact it is an intensely melodramatic tragedy all the way through, everyone is shallow and exploitative and desperate--and they die for it. Even the opening of the play self-indulgently advertises how dire the whole situation is.

2. The One Ring from The Lord of The Rings isn't exactly meant to be a cursed item that corrupts the greedy or weak-minded. Geeky discourse loves to offer up examples of characters "strong enough" or "pure enough" to resist it, but The One Ring turns that trope on its head. The One Ring is an amplifier for power but lesser beings can't make full use of it. Being strong and noble and pure makes you more corruptible, you can bear a heavier load of its dark essence.

3. Keyzer Soze from The Usual Suspects is one of the most famous examples of a villain who fooled everyone and got away with his plotting scot-free. However, the whole huge convoluted mess of a scheme was intended to kill off the last living enemy capable of ID'ing him. Not only did Soze accidentally leave a new witness alive who then cooperated with the police and their sketch artist, he also got himself closely inspected by a whole police station (who now know his true identity.) Yes, it was a good twist and yes, Soze escaped police custody, but his efforts to tie off one loose end resulted in high-quality images of his real face for the FBI Most Wanted list. In most ways this was truly an epic failure for him.

[u/m_snowcrash]

Lolita.

It gets thought of as a forbidden love story between an older guy and an underage girl who is in love and seducing him.

The book? The book makes it absolutely clear that Humbert is a fucking weirdo who's obsessed with Lolita, and the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and that Dolores was just a kid - one that get's targeted and groomed by Humbert.

Heck, Lolita has become a cultural shorthand for a young seductive girl, when the book is more about Humbert’s obsession and delusions.

[u/Waiph → u/m_snowcrash]

IIrc, the author was abused and fucking hates Humbert Humbert even more than Kendrick hates Drake.

[u/Valuable_Victory_271 → u/[deleted]]

Pale Fire isnt about pedophilia and i dont believe that happens on Ada and Ardor as well but i havent read that one.

Not sure where you got the "outside morality" idea. The foreword of Lolita specifically condemns HH

[u/Valuable_Victory_271 → u/[deleted]]

Fair enough but at the same time the book ends badly for HH and Dolores. Even with Nabokov saying that the relationship/abuse doesnt make either characters lives better

Nabokov described Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching'" later in the same interview.[14][15]

Also from the wiki

[u/WeevilWeedWizard → u/[deleted]]

Also apparently

You know you don't have to make statements on things you're ignorant of, right?

[u/justblameaccounting → u/m_snowcrash]

> The book makes it absolutely clear that Humbert is a fucking weirdo who's obsessed with Lolita

It doesn't really, though. Nabokov caught a lot of shit when the book was first published because people people felt it was too ambiguously sympathetic to the narrator. The point of the book is that it's written as a classic love story, and the reader is supposed to apply the horror themselves.

Notably this backfires badly in countries where child marriage is normalized. There's a fantastic non-fiction book by English professor Azar Nafisi titled "Reading Lolita in Tehran". Among other stories of life in Iran, she explains the difficulty of teaching Lolita to students who think Humbert's only wrongdoing was not marrying Lolita right away.

[u/Valuable_Victory_271 → u/justblameaccounting]

Yes it does

Nabokov literally has the foreword say he is not normal and that the following autobiography is to demonstrate how people like him think not to endorse the behavior

[u/ClimateCare7676 → u/justblameaccounting]

I replied to you in another comment. But it's really not written as a classical love story, even if you ignore the plot of him being a creep. There's a literal intro by a fictional psychiatrist that talks of Humbert, who wrote his bullshit from a prison cell after being convicted with murder, as a very disturbed sample of moral leprosy. 

And what other classic love story opens with a main character rambling insanely about being a creep, hating on his wife, then analyse the way the poor woman's lover pisses? It's dark, sardonic and obviously gross. The problem is so many people have never actually read the book, forming their opinion based on the public perception of the story rather than the book itself. 

[u/CJTheran → u/justblameaccounting]

This is a problem of people being stupid, not a problem of authorial intent

[u/Different-Subject903 → u/m_snowcrash]

I was going to give this very example. When I read Lolita I was honestly kind of shocked that it had been so brutally misrepresented, and honestly ANGRY on (fictional) Lolita's behalf that the word Lolita has come to mean a seductive, precocious girl who preys on older men, when she is literally kidnapped, raped and dragged across the country after her mother dies. There is absolutely nothing romantic, precocious, sexy or titillating about it and I don't think the author ever intended that.