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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.

Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.

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> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.

> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.

> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...

Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.

>There must be a name for this type of character influence.

Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.

We could all stand to think about this a little Moore.

The term is: antihero

That's the term for the character. I think they were seeking a term to describe those who perceive antiheroes to be heroes.

Correct. I wouldn’t really call them anti-heroes, however, as those are still meant to be sympathetic.

To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.

The torment nexus, not the torrent nexus(torrent nexus sounds kinda fun)

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