Thread:AustinDR/@comment-3581997-20180107194531

A thought has occurred to me on our classifications. How do we deal with mis-aimed interpretations of a work? This is sort of the next stage from Villains by Proxy, someone that was not meant by the creator to be a villain but is clearly viewed as one by the audience, and no I don't mean simple fan-hate. Here is the sample that occurred to me, but considering the Unfortunate Implications trope, this is hardly an isolated or even small possible situation:

I recently watched a movie called "Christmas with the Kranks" - a couple decide to skip Christmas, their neighbor-hood are very close-knit and try to "rekindle" the Christmas spirit in them (at least this is how the movie seems to present itself but it is not so much rekindling as forcing them to celebrate). Now the movie clearly wants the Kranks to be the antagonists despite being the PoV characters, but the implications are still that it if you don't celebrate Christmas according to your local community's pack-mentality you need to be harassed until you conform. Every critical review I have found points this out and there is a lot of hatred for this film based on it's attempted moral, however that is not what it was made for. These would be more than Ensemble Dark-Horses or Rooting for the Empire, this would come up for creator miscalculations on base story-structure for who is at-fault. So in this situations who would be the antagonist, the couple or the neighbors? Creator intent vs audience reception? Who is the antagonist and how do we categorize it with this sort of media in mind? 