War Is Hell: Anti-war works suffer badly from this. François Truffaut claimed in this interview that he had never seen an anti-war film as the violence on screen can be ambiguous enough to support a pro-war interpretation. Another old saying is "Soldiers love anti-war movies but never the way the maker wants", though these descriptions apply to war in other media as well as film. Plus, Truffaut's theorem isn't the only problem. Even if the work is intended to show how horrible war is, it almost always backfires. While certain aspects of the war can be portrayed negatively, it's near impossible to make a work that is completely anti-war, regardless of the creators' approach, to the point where trying to make an anti-war work ends up futile. There're a few reasons for this:
The fighting looks or sounds cool. If it doesn't, and the battles aren't exciting, then the work can't send its message because no one will want to see/read/listen to a war work with boring battles.
Even if the creators avoid #1, and the work doesn't show any fighting and instead focuses on other negative aspects of war, such as the suffering of civilians or atrocities committed by one or more sides, it's a bit difficult to get the message across. Without showing the fighting, that is, the war part of anti-war, the work can't actually show why the civilians are suffering or why the belligerents are committing these horrible crimes.
While the war itself is meant to be seen negatively, the works often go out of their way to portray at least one side fighting it in a positive light. In addition to seeing the troops fighting cool battles, the audience sees them committing selfless acts of bravery and maintaining strong-willed attitudes of hope and perseverance. So, war brings out the best in people precisely because it sucks.
Even if the creators avoid #3 and the work does focus excessively on the negativity of war besides just the battles, and shows demoralized troops driven to committing horrible atrocities, inevitably, at least one character will withstand it and never break. So, as awful as the war gets, hope always survives.
A—If only one side involved is like this, then it's only anti-war for that side. It's extremely pro-war for another side because it's merely justified them fighting, and the audience wants them to fight against the evil side.
The only time this doesn't happen is when creators put the audience in the shoes of the civilians and refugees affected by war, rather than the combatants. Such a premise—usually involving a main cast of Action Survivors with little to no combat experience pitted against a collective Invincible Villain in the form of well-trained, heavily-armed soldiers—generally avoids many of the pitfalls associated with presenting an anti-war message, as the audience's everyday fears and Realism-Induced Horror will be invoked for all they're worth to show how much it sucks to get caught in an actual armed conflict.
Another type of war film that generally averts this are nuclear holocaust movies like WarGames and The Day After (played seriously, that is; Dr. Strangelove is one of the most notorious cases to play this trope straight because it's a comedy). They often don't show battles and the whole futility of nuclear warfare elevates the conflict to an Enemy Mine between the mutually antagonistic powers to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. If the missiles do start flying, expect to see death, destruction, misery, and the horrifying end of humanity as people either get vaporized or die slowly of radiation poisoning.
Almost any video game that tries to remind us that violence is wrong. OK, here's your Godslayer Blade, Shootemup 6000, and a ridiculously complicated combat system that you must learn to see the story. Oh, and don't kill people, unlike the villain. Attempting to avert this often leads to the same problems as the anti-war film example above (if you don't make the combat in the game fun, people probably won't want to play it, etc.).
The story presents the message that saving innocent people is more important than killing villains, but dilutes said message by only emphasizing it when the hero is romantically interested in the person in need of saving.
The characters who advocate for sparing the villain do so with arguments which hold no water under the circumstances. For instance, invoking If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him! as if there's no moral difference between killing innocent people for personal gain and killing in self-defense, or arguing for letting the justice system do its job when said justice system has failed multiple times with this particular villain.
The villains get killed off anyway at the end of an action-packed climax, after over an hour's worth of misdeeds to ensure that the audience won't mourn them.
Junk food is hard to use to teach a lesson because of how tasty and, in some cases, colorful, it always looks. Any diet commercial will backfire horribly if they show the foods you shouldn't be eating (or should only be eating in moderation) and say that you shouldn't be eating them (or only be eating them in moderation).
British TV chef Jamie Oliver tried to avert this by showing people their weekly intake of junk food all dumped together into a huge unappetizing mess. As Charlie Brooker pointed out, the resulting message was "don't eat your foodthat way".
This backfired again on Jamie Oliver as he tried to explain to children why chicken nuggets made from mechanically separated poultry are terrible and non-nutritious, as he carefully cut up a chicken and used the leftover carcass to make nuggets. The kids happily scarfed them down, to his sad amazement.
Dara Ó Briain mocked this one as well, talking about Gillian McKeith's tendency to show people a table covered in all the crap they shoveled down their throats in any given week—and noted that the looks on their faces tended to be a mixture of pride and lust.
Tobacco:
Any piece of anti-tobacco propaganda where the tobacco user looks surprisingly cool. Especially when it emphasizes someone trying to look cool by smoking or accuses the tobacco industry of glamorizing the use and then clearly identifies how they've played up tobacco usage to look cool, which the viewer may not have noticed before.
Cigarette packaging that has images of injuries that have been acquired from smoking is supposed to deter the buyer from purchasing the cigarettes, which would be easier to do if they weren’t being sold in the first place, and doesn’t work anyway, since the smoker will usually just look at it and think something along the lines of "Well, I don’t do it that much, so it won’t happen to me!" Not exactly cool, but allowing them to be bought and then trying to stop people from buying them instead of just banning them has the same reverse-psychology effect on smokers.
Drugs Are Bad: Anti-drug propaganda suffers heavily from this. Many works spend the first half detailing just how fabulous the wild and crazy world of drug-fueled parties are or throw in things like a funnystoner character or a Mushroom Samba (a mushroom samba might cause some kids to think, "I won't do drugs because I don't want to hallucinate" but it'll cause just as many to think, "Hey—these hallucinations actually look cool!"). It's hard to take it seriously when they conclude with "Drugs are bad. You shouldn't do drugs." Hilariously, multiple studies claim that anti-drug propaganda, both fictional works and real anti-drug programs, like DARE, not only fail to decrease the rate of drug and alcohol use among the participants, but in some places the rates actually increase. There are a few reasons for this:
They expose kids to drugs at an earlier age. How many wouldn't even have known about these evil and destructive substances if the very propaganda trying to keep them off drugs hadn't told them what they were?
It makes drug use seem far more prevalent than it is, making kids think it's normal, especially when they place emphasis on resisting peer pressure, which many kids interpret as "Everyone is doing drugs but you. If you don't do them, prepare to be bullied and ostracized." In the twenty-first century, schools have been getting better about this, saying that everybody is not actually doing drugs and showing statistics to corroborate this.
When the kids get older and learn that some of the information given to them had been, at the very least, exaggerated to Scare 'Em Straight (e.g., one joint of marijuana or one pill of ecstasy will kill you), they may assume that all of it was and decide to try harder drugs. This can result in a kid trying drugs that are highly dangerous/addictive. In some cases exaggerating the dangers of addiction can result in people continuing to do addictive drugs like heroin thinking it's safe after they didn't get addicted from the first hit like they were told, resulting in them actually getting addicted.
Even when being honest, describing the effects doesn't exactly make them unappealing. "Marijuana makes you feel happy and makes things funny. LSD and mushrooms make you see bright colors and patterns. PCP turns you into Superman."
The Aggressive Drug Dealer is almost nonexistent, so if a kid does get approached by a drug dealer, they won't feel nearly as much pressure to buy from them and will realize that real drug dealers, even if they aren't nice, are much nicer than the ones on TV and may feel more inclined to buy from them.
Some anti-drug programs even tell students the current street value of drugs. Instead of resulting in "I would never do that, that's too expensive", this sometimes results in "Hey, [local price] for [drug D] is a good deal."
Many of them go no deeper than "Drugs are bad. Why? Because they’re bad!" rather than describing the adverse effects that using them can have. "If you smoke this green plant that makes you happy and relaxed, bad things will happen to you" will not speak to the target well. "You shouldn’t use cannabis because your brain isn’t developed enough, so you might get addicted and there’s evidence that it could cause you to develop a mental disorder" might work.
Many anti-drug works bring up coolness as a concept and try to say that drugs aren't cool and/or not doing drugs is cool. However, they often do this by giving the drug user attributes associated with being cool (such as a biker aesthetic, Cool Shades, or a Mr. Fanservice or Ms. Fanservice partner), which ends up making the user look cooler than the non-user. Compounded if they also give the non-user attributes associated with being dorky (e.g., glasses, formal attire, and being Book Smart). In addition, they might tell kids not to do drugs by pointing out that most people don't do drugs, which might attract kids who want to be different to drugs.
plastickiwi's submission: Wait… so you're telling me people download and burn their own DVDs… for free? Puck's submission: 90% of you didn't know you could download DVDs off the Internet until we fucking told you not to do it in ads before movies.
In addition, pirating your DVDs is a good way to be freed from those annoying anti-piracy trailers.
And work around the region codes in a No Export for You situation. At least when you do not have to worry about a language barrier.
Video game DRM can get even worse. Even getting beyond the Forbidden Fruit aspect (games with heavy anti-piracy measures, like several Ubisoft releases, tend to be heavily pirated—Ubisoft themselves once claimed 93% of their PC players were pirates—while GOG.com advertises a complete lack of DRM in purchases from them, and have become very successful rather than being pirated out of business), the most infamously draconian systems, with several log-ins and security checks, also tend to be applied in a ridiculously inept fashion: even at their most effective, since there are so many steps to it that can fail for a variety of reasons beyond the player's control, they punish legal players just as much as pirates (pirates don't have access to the log-in server and can't play, yay—whoops, server went down for maintenance/can't handle that many logins/hiccupped when they weren't looking/got pulled down a year later after the sequel was announced, so neither can legal players; also, the game detected software the developer doesn't like on your system, so now you're banned from every other game they have or will make), and at their least, they actively punish actual purchasers more than pirates (for all the same reasons as above, but not being integrated into the software in a way that the pirates can't just rip it out entirely and still have a working game). In extreme cases, people will actually purchase a game, then pirate it anyway just to reach what they legally bought.
Making things even more damning for them is that they have repeatedly made clear through their actions they are only out for the big labels and rights holders, not the actual creators like they repeatedly claim. This was made abundantly clear during the late Bill Clinton era when one of them made a small amendment to an omnibus bill that would have automatically given all sound recordings to the big labels while stripping the rights from the actual creators. And Mitch Glazier, the guy responsible for the incident, later joined the RIAA, ultimately becoming its boss in 2019.
The cameras step into the house of a teenage girl whose "life was ended" by pregnancy only to find that, somehow, her life goes on. It's harder to fear something with which you've become more familiar, especially when that familiarity proves the people trying to warn you away from something are exaggerating its consequences.
Most allegedly struggling teen mothers portrayed in many of these media are rich white girls who don't have to get jobs or miss school or social events to take care of their baby, and can often still get a guy (whether or not he's the father of their child) to go out with them. In a more meta sense, since these women have appeared on TV, they have a certain amount of fame they can leverage into speaking engagements, public appearances, and even endorsement deals, further making it seem more glamorous to outsiders.
There's almost inevitably—especially in documentary versions—a statement somewhere about how, at least in her own estimation, the subject become twice the person she was and how it's really matured her, and how one just doesn't know what love is 'til one is a mother. And yet it still tells the kids not to do it!
Meta-wise, it's literally having the opposite effect on its audience; because of the increasing focus in recent decades on fame and recognition as being the most important value among teens and tweens, there have been instances of young teenagers who want to (or did) get pregnant because they think they will appear on television.
Anything against acquiring excessive material goods, whether it's discouraging greed or if it's anti-consumerism or anti-materialism, can easily fall into this. The story often has to show all the material things that people shouldn't be so greedy for, shouldn't waste their money on, or shouldn't define themselves by, and it's extremely difficult to portray these things without them looking cool. This goes double when the message is aimed at kids.
This happens a lot in Christmas works that try to reinforce the true meaning of the holiday—about family, about giving to the less fortunate, and how it's better to give than to receive—which is then undermined by showing all the awesome presents we shouldn't be so focused on getting. These also tend to end on Sweet and Sour Grapes, where the person is resigned to the fact that getting the awesome toy of the moment isn't what makes a happy Christmas, only to receive it after all.
Hilariously, straight pro-consumerist works such as MTV Cribs and Pimp My Ride have had the exact opposite effect in retrospect, especially after the worldwide financial crash of 2008, since the extravagant bling and hoarding of resources are so unironically over-the-top that they are now seen as a huge part of what was wrong with 2000s popular culture. This was discussed by Charlie Brooker along with works like My Super Sweet Sixteen and the plethora of house hunting shows.
Charlie Brooker: For instance, here, her mum buys her a brand-new sixty-seven-thousand-dollar Lexus. But Audrey's unhappy, because she didn't want it 'til the day of the party. [insert scenes of Audrey complaining that her mother "ruined her life"] Charlie Brooker: Actually, I think this might be an al-Qaeda recruitment film.
Body weight-related issues, either getting too heavy or becoming too thin:
For example, this ad warning about the dangers of anorexia shows a cadaverous-looking young woman◊ (Warning—NSFW image). However, while people without weight issues might be disgusted by sights like these (but it's not like they were going to become suddenly anorexic or obese anyway), they can also give grounds for denial: "I'm not anorexic/obese: I don't look like that!"
With weight loss in particular, the works can become icons as a goal to reach, or for viewers/readers blaming themselves. "Look at her, I couldn't even go as far as she did!"
In the case of some who have gone through the experience of having and "beating" an eating disorder, several times they use pictures like these as "thinspiration" and seeing those images may trigger a relapse.
Going the other way, fat-/body-positive messages that are supposed to tell people who are seen as "large" by society's standards but are actually at a decent, healthy weight that there is nothing wrong with them could be used by actual obese people as an excuse to keep living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Sex Is Evil: Works that make arguments against sex or portraying it openly, whether it's discouraging sexual immorality and promoting abstinence or if it's arguing against the objectification of women.note Some people are asexual, which means they aren't sexually attracted to anyone, but these lessons don't apply to them because they probably weren't seeking out sex anyway.
The work inevitably has to show some sexual imagery, and it's pretty much impossible to show it in a non-appealing light, so either the sex or the portrayal of women comes off as appealing.
With works that promote abstinence, they often get screwed up by trying to balance out the message of how evil and dirty premarital sex is with how great and wonderful sex is once you're married. Unless the work resorts to outright lies, it has no real argument to show any differences between marital and nonmarital sex other than the extremely murky area of "it's bad/sinful/immoral because I/our faith institution/our holy book says so".
A—It's no coincidence that the virginity pledge movement and abstinence trends like purity rings have coincided with rising rates of oral and anal sex among teenagers. While individual leaders and parishes have given their opinions on oral and anal sex, the churches of each sect have yet to take an official position on them. Because oral and anal sex can't result in pregnancy, this leads kids to believe they're just a little bit less sinful than vaginal pre-marital sex, and that it doesn't technically count because it's not the same as vaginal sex.
B—Even with vaginal sex, kids can still find other loopholes, such as being engaged or being "spiritually married". They're not actually married, but they believe that you can still do it as long as you get married later. That part's pretty much in the Bible: ancient Israelite (precursor to Jewish) law specified vaginal intercourse between a man and woman who were both unmarried as being exactly equivalent to marriage vows, the couple becomes instantly married (modern equivalent being "common law" marriage). Hence what seems to be a punishment for premarital sex (marriage) is a logical consequence (and hence no ban on fiancée sex).
Fewer half measures. Sure, total abstinence is a more reliable way to avoid pregnancy and STDs than using a condom, but using protection is still way better than going unprotected. Programs that primarily preach abstinence tend to condemn protected and unprotected sex alike (and even those that acknowledge any difference between the two will often wildly exaggerate how often condoms or other forms of protection fail), so when the kids give in to their lust, they almost certainly won't already have a condom on them "just in case", may not know how to get and use one, and may be unaware of how effective it is and thus think it's not worth the trouble. Tellingly, areas that largely use abstinence-only sexual education tend to have higher rates of teen pregnancy than places that instead use comprehensive sex education.
Along the same lines, prostitution is devilishly difficult to portray in film without glamorizing it. Sex Sells, after all, and it's difficult to show a hooker plying her trade without showing what some of the appeal of that trade is. At the same time, if you do succeed in making prostitution look unappealing (via perhaps showing the cruelty and perversion of the customers or maybe the dangers of the trade), you're very likely to make your film rather unappealing as well, and then no one wants to watch it.
Any work of Speculative Fiction that preaches Humans Are the Real Monsters will inevitably receive lots of hate from people disputing the message and bringing up cases of people doing major good deeds to others with no compensation, because the audience consists of humans, who naturally will disagree with the claim that they and their species are Always Chaotic Evil. It certainly doesn't help that the works in question tend to flanderize human behavior into the worst of the Jim Crow South or apartheid South Africa, and ignore that blatant prejudice is highly frowned upon in most parts of the world today. Oddly, the more general trope of Humans Are Bastards tends to get far less backlash, likely because it's rarely presented in the same all-or-nothing manner and at least some humans are presented as not, in fact, being bastards.
Any of the "technology is bad" messages and the tropes they relate to (whether it's a Green Aesop that suggests technology is at odds with nature, Science Is Bad, New Media Are Evil, New Technology Is Evil, or the idea that "sometimes what's old is better than what's new and you shouldn't like or want some technology just because it's new"). They often portray the technology as something the viewers may well already have and get along fine with or at least know someone who does (video games, cell phones, etc), or as sci-fi stuff like Flying Cars, self-cleaning houses, etc., which just looks very awesome to the viewers (who wouldn't want a flying car?). Not to mention that it's not all that rare to be, or meet someone who is, simultaneously a Nature Lover and a techie.
If you're making a work for kids that with the message that Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films (or play violent video games, or read horror comics), you're almost guaranteed to have this problem. Plenty of kids like horror movies and the like; plus, if the characters are shown enjoying one, children in the audience might end up sympathizing with them even if the lesson is that they shouldn't indulge in such things. It also doesn't help that you won't be able to show anything that would truly be too violent for your intended audience—even if you show a character deeply disturbed by whatever they shouldn't have watched/played, viewers may simply conclude that they're just a total wuss.
Any work that aimed for "don't do X" and has a plot that goes something like "a character does X, and it's awesome until it backfires as a result of them doing something particularly stupid/reckless/selfish". For instance, "crime doesn't pay" may turn into "crime does pay; just don't make the stupid mistake that got the protagonist caught". Likewise, many stories aiming for a "technology is bad" message start out with the characters greatly benefiting from the technology in question until someone starts using it carelessly or using it to excess.note Though at least in that case, "use new technology wisely" is still a perfectly respectable message, even if it may not be what the creator intended.
In a similar vein, some works attempt the message "stealing is wrong" by having a character shoplift something and get away with it, feel guilty about what they've done, then either confess their crime or try to return the stolen item to the store subtly and get caught on the way in. Which implies that someone who could suppress their remorse could steal to their heart's content.
that he had never seen an anti-war film as the violence on screen can be ambiguous enough to support a pro-war interpretation. Another old saying is "Soldiers love anti-war movies but never the way the maker wants", though these descriptions apply to war in other media as well as film. Plus, Truffaut's theorem isn't the only problem. Even if the work is intended to show how horrible war is, it almost always backfires. While certain aspects of the war can be portrayed negatively, it's near impossible to make a work that is completely anti-war, regardless of the creators' approach, to the point where trying to make an anti-war work ends up futile. There're a few reasons for this: