The War on Straw - TV Tropes

You've set out making your latest work with the intention to speak your piece on some contested issue, but you've found it's harder than you expected. You have to write both sides of the issue, after all, and that means fairly representing the other side of the argument. What if you're not entirely clear on what the other side is?

Simple: declare war on straw! You're the writer, aren't you? You control what the "other side" has to say. All you need to do is present the opposing position as a laughable shadow of its true self and you can easily knock it over. You'll always be the winner! Everybody loves a winner. Bonus points if the opposing side is violently murdered afterwards (with the killer never being punished, naturally, because why would you ever punish someone who's right?).

Some of the tropes here are not strawmen every time they appear; for instance, a Corrupt Church, Animal Wrongs Group, or Amoral Attorney can sometimes be used as a villain a la Acceptable Targets without any (deliberate) intention of making a larger political statement. Sometimes people use those things with the justification that they do exist in reality to a limited extent — but they are still strawmen when used, implicitly or explicitly, to try to make a larger argument against anyone who shares their beliefs (especially if they happen to be particularly extreme and/or alienating to even other people who do share them but are decidedly more moderate about the topic in question).

Sometimes the existence of non-corrupt/wrong/amoral versions is acknowledged in the setting to indicate that there's no hard feelings; on the other hand, sometimes those good versions are really a Fox News Liberal used to try to make an actual strawman less obvious.

It is also important to note that caricature, itself, can be a perfectly valid way to make an argument; Voltaire, Swift, and many other writers have used it effectively and incisively against their opponents. The distinction is that valid caricatures use exaggeration and hyperbole as rhetorical devices to present nonetheless legitimate arguments, exposing the victim's failings and flaws without misrepresenting them. But the line between the two can be extremely thin, especially in unskilled hands or when the author does not truly understand what they are trying to caricature; many authors have produced strawmen that were painfully obvious to others while believing themselves to be penning biting Swiftian satire.

For more detail about the fallacy upon which this series of tropes is named, see the "Strawman Fallacy" section of Logical Fallacies.

The flip side (where a position is so off-the-wall that it's impossible to distinguish between a genuine statement and an exaggeration/parody) is Poe's Law. The actual inverse is sometimes referred to as steelmanning, where a debater attacks the strongest possible interpretation of their opponent's argument (in essence, an armor-plated strawman), even if it is not the argument they necessarily made. This is often used against evasive "guerrilla debaters" who attempt to avoid actually presenting their own arguments, in the hope of constantly taking shots at their opponent without having to defend their own position.

A related fallacy is called nutpicking, a portmanteau word of "nut" and "cherrypicking." Nutpicking is selecting a few extreme, easily attacked members of a group and dishonestly holding them up as typical members of that group.

If you are a content creator, a way to avoid attacking a straw man is to study what the other side says, and why, well enough to pass an ideological Turing test as a member of the other side.

When you fought the straw and the straw won (in the opinion of your readers/viewers), it's Strawman Has a Point.

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The War On Straw has many fronts; among them are:

• Agent Scully: Skeptics, scientists, atheists, and non-believers in religion, magic, extraterrestrial contact, or the paranormal are depicted as stubborn, closed-minded, and dogmatic.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Drug dealers, advocates, and anyone even remotely lenient to drug use are portrayed as monsters who want to get as many people as possible addicted, particularly children, through intimidation or violence if necessary.
• All Issues Are Political Issues: Can be used against any political ideology.
• Ambulance Chaser: When the strawmen are portrayed as In-Universe unacceptable targets.
• Amoral Attorney: Lawyers are depicted as slimy and untrustworthy due to the nature of their job (which usually involves defending unscrupulous clients).
• Amoral Talent Agent: Talent agents are depicted as untrustworthy and amoral at best and villainous at worst due to their focus on capitalism in art.
• Angry White Man: A majority is portrayed or generalized as ignorant towards the suffering of historically oppressed minorities.
• Angry Black Man: A minority is portrayed or generalized as being angry, violent, or easily offended for no reason.
• Animal Wrongs Group: Animal rights advocates are depicted as uncaring towards human lives and willing to risk human society and public safety to save a few animals.
• Anti-Role Model: A character who does bad things does them in the worst possible way and is cast in the worst possible light, ignoring anything remotely good about it, so as to prevent that character from being a role model and discourage younger audiences from emulating their behavior.
• Assimilation Academy: Schools are depicted as soul-sucking institutions designed to remove the personality of their students and mold everyone into being completely identical drones with no will to stand up to corrupt authority.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: A work with an anti-religious slant portrays believing in the existence of deities as committing intellectual suicide or a trait which only exists among the dumb.
• Berserk Button: The opponent is easily offended by something trivial.
• Blonde Republican Sex Kitten: Women with conservative values are portrayed as young, attractive, fit, and blonde to combat the stereotype that conservatives mostly consist of older men.
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: For Order vs. Chaos stories where people on the chaos side are portrayed as Ax-Crazy and unsympathetic.
• Category Traitor: The author creates the false idea that anybody from a group of people who doesn't follow the same beliefs as that group is betraying them.
• Corrupt Church: If that trope is used to portray a real-world religion or religious institution, or an obvious Expy of one.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Frequently, when one of these appears in fictionland, it's to either be, or set up, a strawman.
• Crapsack World: Often a society in which everything the author is against has taken over.
• Crapsaccharine World: Ditto, but only characters who are "in the right" benefit from said world.
• Cruella to Animals: Anyone who makes or uses animal products of any kind is framed as though they actually take pleasure in animals dying.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Something the author doesn't like is depicted as something that only idiots support or appreciate.
• Deconstruction Fic: If it ends up turning into a Revenge Fic against particular characters.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: When presented in an Anvilicious way.
• Demonization: When the strawman is not only wrong, but evil too.
• Designated Evil: The author decides that a character's action is bad without much thought as to why.
• Designated Hero: The author establishes a "good" and "correct" character we're expected to side with, but fails to provide sufficient reasoning as to why they're in the right.
• Designated Villain: The author establishes a "bad" and "wrong" character that is demonized, the reasoning simply being that they disagreed with the protagonist, if any sufficient reason is provided to begin with.
• Dry Crusader: Everyone who drinks alcohol is considered to be worse than the Devil. Can also be used to assume that anyone who refrains from alcohol acts this way towards drinkers.
• Dystopia: Not always straw, but straw is a frequent component.
• Easy Evangelism: The strawman has never considered the opposing view and immediately converts once they hear an explanation.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Making the villain object to the strawman's point, implying that you are worse than the villain for agreeing with the strawman. The villain is usually made unforgivable to both sides in order to emphasize this.
• Executive Excess: Business executives are portrayed as hedonistic and wasteful, to the point that they're rarely seen actually putting in a full day of work. Sometimes meant as a critique of the corporate hierarchy or lifestyle.
• Family-Values Villain: If combined with the Heteronormative Crusader.
• False Dichotomy: Two fronts for the price of one!
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Atheism and non-believers are portrayed as being out of touch with reality and refusing to believe even obvious facts that are not immediately apparent.
• For Science!: Scientists and researchers are depicted as being willing to do anything (usually immoral acts) for no practical purpose.
• Fox News Liberal: Opposing viewpoints are represented, usually by a character touted as an "expert" or "true believer" type, but deliberately improperly to make said opposing viewpoints seem weak, impractical, or naturally difficult to uphold; basically an echo chamber disguised as a balanced roundtable.
• The Fundamentalist: Religious people and clergy are depicted as uncompromising, intolerant fundamentalist extremists who despise anyone they brand a "non-believer" and often try to forcibly convert others.
• Fur and Loathing: Character clothing choice is used to mark those with "bad" or "incorrect" positions.
• Gay Conservative: Homophobic conservatives (or homophobes in general), are depicted as secretly gay and thus hypocritical "rules for thee" types. If the conservative character is not homophobic, the strawman argument may instead be that LGBTQ people cannot be politically conservative.
• Godwin's Law: Comparing anything the author doesn't like with one of the worst dictators in human history.
• Golden Mean Fallacy: To declare that both sides are extreme and the "correct" position is somewhere in the middle. Often used against political centrists and anyone who tries to find a middle ground, regardless of how reasonable they are.
• Good Is Dumb: Portrays goodness and idealism as utterly moronic and out of touch with life.
• Greedy Jew: Jewish people are depicted as greedy, amoral, and unpleasant people conspiring against Western civilization.
• Hate Fic: Often transforms the cast of the attacked work into unsympathetic caricatures.
• Hate Sink: The author creates the strawman to attract hate to promote a point.
• The Hedonist: Those who live pleasure-seeking lifestyles are portrayed as self-centered, materialistic, and excessive.
• Heteronormative Crusader: Can either crop up in Slash Fics where a character is hit by Ron the Death Eater, Gay Aesops via Compressed Vice, or Cure Your Gays stories where this character is the one who's right.
• Holier Than Thou: Religious people are portrayed as morally-grandstanding jerks, if not outright evil hypocrites.
• Hollywood Atheist: Atheists and non-religious people are depicted as immoral, miserable, or venomous towards believers.
• Hollywood Satanism: Satanists and adherents of pagan religions are portrayed as violent crazed cultists with odd and immoral practices.
• Hunting Is Evil: Hunters are depicted as immoral nature-haters who enjoy killing living beings or go poaching, sometimes even if their prey is clearly endangered, rare, or not an animal in the first place (i.e. human).
• Informed Wrongness: The strawman is in the wrong for weak reasons.
• Internal Affairs: The higher-ups in law enforcement agencies are depicted as corrupt and irresponsible.
• Internal Retcon: Crops up in works that promote denialism.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Insisting that doing one morally ambiguous thing leads to a string of doing increasingly worse immoral things.
• Lady Land: You have two options: a Utopia or a Dystopia. Either way, strawmen are a very frequent feature, though that's not inherent to this trope (maybe 60% and 90% straw by volume).
• Lawful Stupid, Chaotic Stupid: For a series where Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous.
• Loners Are Freaks: Introverts, shy people, and loners are unsympathetically portrayed as being socially inept openly-weird losers at best, and psychologically unstable freaks with skeletons in their closet at worst.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: Virginal, modest women are framed as pure and perfect and thus deserving of a Happily Ever After with The Protagonist, while women who aren't virgins or don't dress or behave a certain way are irredeemably evil and deserving of violence, if not death.
• Malcolm Xerox: Left-leaning minority activists, often black power activists, are depicted as paranoid delusional loons who think "the white man" is out to get them.
• Minority Supremacist: Minority civil rights activists are depicted as violent extremists who believe only marginalized groups (usually solely theirs) deserve rights and that the majority should be repressed or exterminated as revenge for their oppression.
• Nature Is Not Nice: Nature is a terrible and scary place and should be destroyed for the good of the animals living there.
• New Media Are Evil: New technologies and forms of media are portrayed as inherently immoral, destructive to society, and created, distributed, or managed with ill intentions. Usually, but not always, the media format the work is originally distributed through, such as a print magazine, is upheld as better — nevermind that such "old media" started out as new media in its time.
• The New Rock & Roll: New fads and ideas, usually innocuous ones, are attacked and exaggerated by characters or authors who do not understand their appeal or what they are about and frame them as ill-intentioned.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: When the strawman in question is an honest representation. Can sometimes become a more typical example if the specific strawman is a fringe part of the targeted group but the author acts as if they represent the entire demographic for the sake of fighting an easy target (see discussion of nutpicking above), or if the strawman's "not made up" words are twisted out of context.
• No Mere Windmill: The protagonist is dismissed as crazy, but is actually right all along. Already tends to use some straw, but leans more into strawman territory if it's an allegory for a real belief or phenomenon the author believes is being dismissed by the uninformed public, such as environmental issues, political shifts, or fringe ideas.
• No Woman's Land: Countries that are not as progressive in women's rights as the author's own are depicted as being openly hostile toward women and violently against feminist ideals.
• Old Media Are Evil: The opposite of New Media Are Evil, portraying older "traditional media" (e.g. newspapers, radio, television) as outdated and untrustworthy rags run by the Establishment as obvious propaganda, or desperate out-of-touch executives who are behind the times and have all but given up on quality standards to remain afloat, often catering to older, equally out-of-touch audiences.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: When used as a way for the author to say religion is evil or encumbering on society.
• Outside Joke: A joke based on a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the subject.
• Parody Religion: Often takes the form of several religions lumped together regardless of whether they have anything in common, or a thinly-veiled misrepresentation of real religions, particularly practices the author deems problematic.
• Path of Inspiration: Same as Corrupt Church.
• Poe's Law: When a strawman is mistaken for the real thing, or vice versa.
• Political Correctness Is Evil: Social justice activists are portrayed as hypersensitive, confrontational pricks, sometimes from privileged backgrounds (the implication being that their arguments thus hold less weight than someone who isn't from privilege), who make mountains out of molehills and may have deeper bad motives for their activism.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: A strawman is portrayed as a flawed hero to promote them in a negative light.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: A strawman is portrayed an evil bigot for the heroes to destroy.
• Politically Motivated Teacher: A teacher, or even teachers and the education system in general, is portrayed as abusing their education position to spread political propaganda and force their opinions on the youth, even to the detriment to their actual learning.
• Political Overcorrectness: Political correctness is Played for Laughs by exaggerating it to the point of absurdity.
• Pompous Political Pundit: News reporters and pundits that don't share the author's political beliefs are depicted as unreasonable, belligerent, and detrimental to whatever program or venue is hosting them.
• The Presents Were Never from Santa: When the trope is used to dismiss authority and undermine legitimacy.
• Revenge Fic: Canon characters are transformed into strawmen.
• Revolutionaries Who Don't Do Anything: Political extremists and radicals are depicted as incompetent, ineffectual paper tigers who are "all talk, no game" and either instantly fold upon facing any resistance, are too busy infighting to act in their interests, or simply never take to the streets or spread their message in the first place. Alternatively, the point may be that said political groups genuinely don't want major systemic change or are less radical than they claim to be, because no one would ever go against the status quo.
• Ron the Death Eater: Demonization applies to a canonical hero for their flaws and/or evil sides.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Things that the author opposes are portrayed as having horrible consequences if one does or associates with them, regardless of how likely or feasible said consequences actually are.
• School Is for Losers: Characters who disagree with or aren't interested in basic public education are portrayed as idiots.
• Sub-Par Supremacist: Characters who claim a group they're a part of is better than others hypocritically fail to exhibit any of that group's traits.
• Straw Affiliation: In the same vein as Category Traitor, people who are a part of a certain group are portrayed as not being allowed to endorse things that are typically not associated with them (e.g. women and minorities can't be conservatives, authority figures like police officers can't be liberals, etc.).
• Straw Civilian: In a police- or military-focused work, most or all non-police/non-military characters are shown as being actively hostile and belligerent toward them and intentionally closed-minded when it comes to understanding their perspectives.
• Straw Critic: Media critics are portrayed as snooty and uptight elitists who make confidently-incorrect "analyses" and are unusually strict or harsh with their critiques. Sometimes used to portray or lampoon specific critics or opinions on works by a disgruntled author, such as film critic characters quoting and spoofing the poor reviews of a director's previous film.
• Straw Fan: The worst aspects of a fanbase are applied to all fans in general, usually to dismiss any criticisms said fanbase has for the author's work.
• Straw Feminist: Feminists are depicted as combative radicals who are inherently hostile toward men and tend to bring up uncouth sexual topics a lot.
• Straw Hypocrite: The hypocrite doesn't even believe what they preach; as with Amoral Attorney or Corrupt Church, not always a subtrope of the War on Straw, but a frequent one nevertheless.
• Straw Loser: Characters who don't conform to what the author likes or believes are portrayed as having undesirable qualities that imply they "deserve" ridicule.
• Strawman Emotional: Characters who act on their emotions are framed as irrational.
• Strawman Has a Point: What happens when bad writing or authorial myopia creates a front in the War on Straw that the author actually has a chance of losing.
• Strawman News Media: News media are portrayed as being untrustworthy and biased, usually run as narrative-controlling propaganda arms of the Establishment, out-of-touch "old media" who have long abandoned any journalistic integrity in pursuit of the next "scoop", or otherwise poor sources of information on anything that matters.
• Strawman Product: Mudslinging a competitor's product to uplift the one being advertised.
• Strawman U: Certain types of schools are portrayed as attracting strawmen who are politically opposite of the author.
• Straw Misogynist: A particularly Anvilicious portrayal of He-Man Woman Hater characters.
• Straw Nihilist: Nihilists get Flanderized as villains with questionable morals who hate everyone and everything.
• Straw Vegetarian: Vegetarians and vegans are depicted as intolerant grandstanders, usually stereotypical progressives, who are fiercely intolerant of meat eaters (sometimes to an almost discriminatory degree) and actively try to force their dietary ways on others.
• Straw Vulcan: Logical thinkers are depicted as cold and emotionless.
• Strawman Ball: The author's opposing ideas are passed between different characters, usually similar to Flip-Flop of God.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: When the writer is convinced that their opponents won't accept their views even when they're proven to be correct.
• There Are No Good Executives: Businesspeople are depicted as all being self-centered greedy jackasses with no concerns for morals or anything other than immediate profit, with no dissenting voices among them.
• This Loser Is You: A negatively portrayed protagonist meant to represent the audience. Not always a strawman, but it can often come off that way if the author assumes too much about their audience.
• Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: To make a product appealing, advertisers portray people who aren't using the product as incompetent morons who can't even do the simplest tasks without it.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Essentially a strawman version of The Idealist.
• Windmill Crusader: What the author comes off as if the opponents they're railing against aren't even an actual threat.
• Windmill Political: The author tries to convince their audience that what they're attacking is a threat when it really isn't.

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