"We live in a world where even kings have vices. Well then we are the kings and we are your vice!"
— Rocky Romero, Roppongi Vice
While some fictional characters are only meant to represent themselves, others are meant to represent something larger than themselves in order to make a point. The author uses this character to represent X, whether X is "Women", "Christians", "Atheism", "Illegal Aliens", "The Bush Administration", or even "You". It's the difference between "Oh, Bob just tripped over the cat again; he is such an idiot" and "Bob just tripped over the cat again; men are such idiots."
Sometimes characters are created to be this. Other times, an existing character is (either temporarily or not) drafted into the role by being written as the voice/face/advocate of (topic) for an episode. This can even happen outside of the official canon; in fact, the more this is used outside of the original work, the stronger the case may be for the character being an effective symbol of X.
Please note that the character in question may be a perfectly well-rounded and very much individualized character, but he is so closely linked to a certain concept, that he is often used allegorically as a way of talking about that concept (e.g. Superman and idealism).
If all of the characters in the work are written this way, then you might just have a full-blown Allegory on your hands. It's also possible to have characters be this in-universe, particularly in a Mental World or in a World of Symbolism-type of story.
When no extra meaning is intended by the creators, then it may be that you have Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory — although adherents to Death of the Author would point out that just because the allegory wasn't intended, doesn't mean it isn't there.
A form of Characters as Device. Compare Archetypal Character.
Subtropes:
Necessarily Allegorical
- Alice and Bob — These meta-characters represent participants in a generic situation.
- Anthropomorphic Personification — This character represents an abstract concept.
- Anthropomorphic Vice — This subtype personifies a form of addiction, consumable or otherwise.
- Moe Anthropomorphism: This subtype represents an abstract concept as a cute girl or boy, with the concept typically visualised through their clothing.
- Anti-Role Model — This character represents the opposite of proper behavior.
- Audience Surrogate — This character represents you.
- Naïve Newcomer — This character represents you because you are both new to the story.
- Only Sane Man — This character represents you because everyone else is crazy.
- This Loser Is You — This character represents you, you pathetic soul.
- The Watson — This character represents you and asks the questions you would be asking.
- Author Avatar — This character represents the author of the work.
- Bob from Accounting — This character represents the generic coworker.
- Composite Character — This character represents multiple people or a whole group.
- The Everyman — This character represents default personhood.
- Funny Foreigner — This character represents humorous stereotypes about a certain people.
- Herald — This character represents the Call to Adventure.
- Homegrown Hero — This character represents people from the same country as you.
- Hope Bringer — This character represents the return of hope.
- Incorruptible Pure Pureness — This character represents the highest standard of moral purity by being unable to be tempted or corrupted.
- Lady in Red — This character represents temptation and seduction.
- Living MacGuffin — This character represents the drive of the narrative.
- Long-Lost Uncle Aesop — This bit character represents An Aesop.
- Morality Chain/Morality Pet — This character represents the good of humanity at large to a particular person.
- Nations as People — These characters represent a countries/nations.
- Nature Spirit — This character represents a natural phenomenon.
- The Paragon — This character represents the ideal of heroism.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child — This character represents the human cost of a new technology.
- Series Mascot — This (usually nonhuman) character represents the work they're from.
- Straw Critic — This character represents criticisms of the work in which they appear.
- Straw Fan — This character represents fans of the work in which they appear.
- The Three Faces of Adam — This character represents a phase of life that men go through.
- The Hecate Sisters — This character represents a phase of life that women go through.
- The Three Faces of Eve — These characters represent the three aspects of traditional femininity.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth — This character represents tragic purity in a cruel world.
- The War on Straw — This character represents all members of an ideology the author disagrees with.
Often Allegorical
- Big Bad — This character often represents everything wrong with the world.
- Big Good — This character often represents everything right in the world.
- Blind Justice — This character represents unclouded moral righteousness.
- The Cassandra — This character represents ignored truths.
- Ignored Expert — This character represents ignored scientific truths.
- Child Soldiers — These characters often represent the human cost of war.
- The Conscience — This character represents someone else's inner moral voice.
- Cousin Oliver — This character often represents the younger generation in a mostly older cast.
- Damsel in Distress — This character represents everything the protagonist is fighting for.
- Dark Lord on Life Support — This character often represents an empire in decline.
- Founder of the Kingdom — This character often represents the ethos of the place they founded.
- The Ghost — This unseen character often represents an external force of some sort.
- Grande Dame — This character often represents a bygone era.
- Greek Chorus — These pseudo-characters often represent the collective wisdom of a populace.
- The Ingenue — This character often represents innocence and purity.
- The Last DJ — This character represents a dying field or way of life.
- Lead You Can Relate To — This character represents people like the presumed viewer.
- Mysterious Waif — This young female character often represents a larger theme within the work.
- Naïve Everygirl — This character represents that default young woman.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat — This character often represents a larger, obstructive system.
- The Ophelia — This young, mad female character often represents societal decay and corrupted innocence.
- The Pollyanna — This character often represents optimism and the never-give-up aesop.
- Present Absence — This character, significantly absent for much of the narrative, often represents a similarly absent concept.
- Psychosexual Horror — This character represents sexual development and sexual activities.
- Save This Person, Save the World — Saving this character represents saving everything else. Often literal, but sometimes allegorical.
- The Smurfette Principle — This character often represents women in general.
- Token Black Friend — This character often represents Black people in general.
- Tragic Monster — This character often represents some real-life emotional or physical problem.
- What If God Was One of Us? — This human character represents the divine.
Example subpages:
Other examples
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Anime & Manga
- Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest: There's Kouki Amanogawa. In a Deliberate Values Dissonance way. Kouki's views of "justice" (in a Good Feels Good way), The Needs of the Many (i.e. thinking of the group besides one's own individuality), bullying, and the use of Victim-Blaming aren't all that different from what most of Japanese society thinks and functions as, and showing the ugly sides of it.
- Chainsaw Man': Many of the Devils, as embodiments of humanity's fears, are also serve as social critiques. The most prominent is that contracts can be made by those in power in exchange for the lives and well-being of their citizens, all without their knowledge or consent. The Gun Devil's attacks are reminiscent of both mass shootings across the world and the use of a WMD to put a stop to a Japanese threat, with countless civilians killed in the crossfire. Later on, the Aging Devil's demand for 10,000 children to be sacrificed is symbolic of younger generations being sacrificed to benefit the elderly—an especially salient issue in Japan, which has the world's oldest population.
- Death Note:
- Light Yagami
- Light is a walking societal critique of Japan's Lost Generation, children who grew up during the late nineties and early 2000s to find that despite all their hard work, they find themselves in a world with few job opportunities and other cruel hardships, with some ending up joining in the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist attack
.
- Light can also be read as an allegory for the dangers of personality cults, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. He begins with a vigilante-like sense of justice, but his access to absolute power transforms him into someone who elevates himself above institutions, seeks mass devotion, suppresses opposition, and justifies extreme means for a utopian end—all central traits of personality cults and authoritarian/totalitarian regimes. The work portrays both the psychological dynamics (narcissism, rationalization of crime) and the social mechanisms (public adoration of Kira, implicit propaganda, control of discourse) that align with political definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
- Light is a walking societal critique of Japan's Lost Generation, children who grew up during the late nineties and early 2000s to find that despite all their hard work, they find themselves in a world with few job opportunities and other cruel hardships, with some ending up joining in the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist attack
- L, for his part, can be read as an allegory for the contemporary, security-driven pragmatism of institutions (the gray zone: morally questionable, but effective), in contrast to the moralizing dogmatism embodied by Light. While Light is moralizing and on the path toward becoming authoritarian/totalitarian, L’s sense of justice is logical, cold, and surgical. He is not guided by romantic or utopian ideals, but by what the facts indicate: evidence, hypotheses, deduction, probability, logic. Likewise, his anonymity gives him a symbolic character: L is not just a detective with a name, but a role—an instance of authority that operates above the personal, similar to the way government institutions function: impersonal, abstract, more concerned with results than with empathy. You can see the parallels in the way L operates and the way government institutions act in the 21st century: he spies on Light and his family without a warrant, detains, coerces, and imprisons without conclusive evidence, manipulates and uses innocents as pawns to advance his objectives, and justifies dubious means because they are necessary to catch Kira.
- Light Yagami
- Delicious in Dungeon: In a Nightmare Weaver-induced nightmare, Marcille is running from a monster that ages anything it touches, eats everyone it can get its grasp on, and is slow but unrelenting, consuming everyone around her except for Marcille who's the only one fast enough to escape it. It represents Marcille's fear of her loved ones' mortality. As an elf, she will outlive almost everyone around her, a fear that has been with her ever since her father died when she was very young.
- Is It My Fault That I Got Bullied?: Shinji Suzuki perfectly represents the Japanese bully and how far they could get in Japanese culture, along with the bullying problem in Japan represented in this manga. Shinji was a popular student with a bright future and class president; he was also a satanic bully who would go as far as torturing his victims with all his classmates, knowing what he was doing and still loving him despite the inhuman torture of his victim. He grew up to be a banker who used his ruthless personality to reject more caring clients and would sympathize with his boss using him for that type of work. All his coworkers loved him, viewing him as an elite person. He's very much a ruthless person, and society in Japan encouraged his cruelty, which allowed him to succeed in life. Fortunately, the story shows that there are limits to how much he can get away with. When one of his victims revealed his crimes to his boss and coworkers, they were disgusted, and he was denied a promotion. His coworkers no longer respected him and refused to associate with him while sympathizing with his victim. That shows that there are limits to how much society can take from a person's cruelty and that their crime will eventually catch up to them.
- Monster (1994): Johan Liebert can be read as an allegory for postmodern nihilism, the crisis of meaning, and the moral fragmentation that followed the collapse of the great ideological systems in the post–Cold War era. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the socialist bloc, Europe (and Germany in particular) experienced a vacuum of values. Johan, born into that landscape of ideological ruins, is a being without a moral center—the result of experiments that sought to create the ‘perfect soldier’ but without ethics or empathy. Everyone tries to assign him some ideological meaning or conventional explanation about what he is and who he is… but there is nothing—absolutely nothing. Johan is simply a human being with no supernatural powers of any kind; none of his motivations are tied to grand conspiracies, and he takes no pleasure in committing terrible acts. He is so profoundly empty inside that his evil is the only thing he truly possesses. Not even Johan himself understands why he chooses to do evil; the only coherent theory the characters can formulate is that he wants to die and take the world with him. He is the quintessential embodiment of postmodern nihilism: a serial killer devoid of ideology, fully aware of the moral void, and perhaps most ironically, the product of systems that no longer exist—though their consequences persist.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
- Kyubey represents a system that preys on and exploits the innocent and vulnerable, specifically young girls. He seeks out girls who are in a vulnerable position, often to the point where they have no choice but to accept his offer, and offers them seemingly everything they want in return for working for him. This quickly turns out to be a faustian bargain, as the work they have to do is emotionally and physically devastating, to the point of death more often than not, with him having no concern for the girls' safety or health as long as they provide what he needs from them. In fact, their deaths and what's worse is what he specifically wants, because the entire system he is part of literally runs on the suffering of young girls. Like any number of real life exploitative systems — the idol industry, the patriarchy, or even just capitalism in general — Kyubey uses hopeful little girls until they're spent, and then throws them aside once their usefulness is at an end.
- In Magia Record's Act 2 arc, Kyubey takes on additional capitalistic characteristics where he puts those he exploits under him for his own gain, Magical Girls in this case. By stirring conflict between different factions of Magical Girls over something that they'd ultimately benefit from, the Automatic Purification System, that threatens his own status quo, he gets concessions and weakens a unified front against his manipulations despite most of the groups wanting the Automatic Purification System for the same reason and, ultimately, being able to share it in theory, bringing into mind those in power amplifying and creating divisions to prevent unified fronts from those beneath them.
- Record of Ragnarok: Jack the Ripper represents the malice of humanity, best illustrated by the titles given to him by the announcer Heimdall (e.g., "The Darkest of Evils", "Humanity's Greatest Evil", etc.). The premise of Round 4 has him going against Heracles, whom the narrative clearly associates with justice. Lastly, the main character Brunhilde, besides describing Jack as "the most despicable scum in human history", has something to say about this.
Brunhilde: Geir. What is the one thing that humanity excels above the gods in…? Do you know?
(Beat)
Brunhilde: It is… malice. The personification of that endless abyss shall bore into the soul of the most righteous god… - In Sailor Moon:
- Helios/Pegasus represents the personification of dreams and faith. Chibiusa is content to befriend him and keep their dreams pure, despite being tempted to do more. This is in contrast to Big Bad Nehellenia whose corrupted dreams include wanting to own him.
- Nehellenia can be seen as the embodiment of childish nihilism. Her entire motive in Stars is wanting to destroy Usagi's life, kidnap her friends and lover, and erase Usagi's daughter out of existence because she is deeply envious of the happiness Usagi has with her loved ones.
- Tomie: Junji Ito has stated he wrote Tomie as a representation of his fears of emotionally manipulative women. She's also been noted as a stand-in for the cycle of abuse, representing a regenerating, cyclical force that was created as a result of her teacher committing statutory rape and getting her killed by accident. She haunts the world by relying on parasitic exploitation and driving innocents into either obsession or hatred, which both lead to their doom. Similar to real-life abusers, the most viable tactic for survival seems to be to ignore her.
Art
- Charity was a popular character in paintings meant to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of her namesake. Artists like William-Adolphe Bouguereau made multiple portraits of the virtue, including one that highlights the difficulties of the demands of love while still glorifying it.
- Civic Virtue Triumphant over Unrighteousness:
- The male figure itself is "Civic Virtue".
- The two female figures lounging by Civic Virtue represents "vice" and "corruption", being sirens who attempt to capture Civic Virtue, only to get trapped in their own nets.
- Dawn (William-Adolphe Bouguereau): The woman presented in the image is meant to represent the time of dawn.
- Sandro Botticelli's Fortezza is a regal and armored woman as an allegory of fortitude (Fortezza in Italian).
- Nue Couchée: The sculpture is a representation of the horrifying implications of the Male Gaze, of how it hurts women on so many levels. Specifically, by twisting their bodies in unnatural ways for the sole purpose of Fanservice; therefore dehumanizing women. Fitting, since the thing only barely looks like a person.
- Many of the non-human characters in Naudline Pierre's paintings are meant to act as Anthropomorphic Personifications of different aspects of the main character on her spiritual journey.
- Worker and Kolkhoz Woman: Two characters symbolizing the union of industrial and agricultural proletarians.
Comic Books
- American Born Chinese: Chin-Kee represents Jin's frustration with his Chinese roots and how he perceives the way other people, namely his white peers, perceive him because of them. Every year, he comes to Danny's school and ruins his life. No matter what Danny (Jin) does, he can't escape him, because Chin-Kee is part of him whether he likes it or not.
- The Boys has most of the major characters represent various facets of the military-industrial complex in keeping with its critique of The War on Terror. Most of the other characters represent the comics industry.
Hughie: Jesus Christ, you bloodless fucking… who are you?
Stillwell: I'm an expression of the corporation. I'm the voice that says, "You're right, sue us." That never gets upset. - The DCU:
- Superman
- Clark Kent (Superman) is the pinnacle of humanity's ideals and faith in humanity.
- If Superman represents Hope, then Lex Luthor would ideally personify Despair, given his ability to lead others astray through his charisma, use his talents for evil deeds, his actions contributing to the ruination of countless for his own advancements, and technically profiting off others' struggles and misery and almost everything is done solely to benefit himself.
- Batman
- Bruce Wayne (Batman) is the determination to stand up to injustice and always doing the right thing no matter the cost.
- The Joker represents both Chaos while Batman represents Order and is the epitome of madness incarnate.
- Harley Quinn — This Character is the representation of a toxic relationship and then breaking free of one.
- Green Lantern — This character is the sheer force of human willpower and the willingness to face their fears.
- Wonder Woman
- Princess Diana of Themyscira/Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) is Women's Strength and Courage (often associated with Feminism).
- Queen Atomia — This Character is the dangers of nuclear experimentation.
- New Gods
- Darkseid — This Character is the representation of tyranny and oppression.
- Superman
- Flex Mentallo: In practice, the entire cast is allegorical to a variety of different concepts. The main ones are Flex Mentallo (who represents all that is pure and idealistic about superhero stories and innocent fantasies in general), Wally Sage (who stands for the many complexities of being both audience and author to art) and Lord Limbo (who stands for the enigmatic, transcendental nature of superhero fiction). Other prominent characters such as Lt. Harry (a all-purpose stand-in for the hapless citizens of superhero fiction and, by extension, regular humans outside of comics) and The Hoaxer (who gestures towards the impossibility of fully comprehending reality) are also examples, and it is part of the narrative's goal for the reader to navigate the allegories in the cast.
- Elephantmen: The four main Elephantmen represent how people tend to deal with trauama.
- Ebony Hide falls into drug use and escapism.
- Hip Flask embraces reality for all of it's pros and cons. He becomes a relatively normal member of society.
- Obadiah Horn turns his trauma into ambition and a hunger to shape his world as he sees fit.
- Nathaniel Trench is pretty much always on duty and can be seen at murder scenes or in fights himself. The war never ended for him.
- Marvel Universe:
- Captain America — This Character is The American Dream (and often the Dream's disconnect from modern American politics and social trends).
- The Incredible Hulk — Bruce Banner (The Hulk) represents the atomic bomb.
- Iron Man — Tony Stark (Iron Man) represents the weapons industry.
- Spider-Man
- Peter Parker (Spider-Man) is the will to overcome tragedy and strife.
- Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2022): Agent Gao (War-Cry)
- Gao is a stand-in for the impunity that police officers enjoy while committing ever more public acts of brutality against vulnerable people, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Rather than enforcing justice, Gao has seemingly unlimited reach when it comes to enforcing the unjust Powers Act instituted by Wilson Fisk solely to curtail New York's superhero population. Her Skewed Priorities and targeting of people who don't deserve to be criminalized causes her to butt heads with Miles constantly as someone who has been on the recieving end of this treatment far too many times.
- The Marvel Voices: Infinity webcomic series furthers this notion, as she and her Cape Killers are deployed to arrest a group of homeless people for the crime of trying to find shelter in what the police claim to be private property in what's actually a public park beneath a bridge. She and Taskmaster use excessive force against the elderly and infirm while beating Aaron Fischer, the Captain America of the Railways, until he bled for resisting arrest.
- The Sentry: A recurring enemy of Sentry, even appearing more than the Void, in the Age of the Sentry mini is a villain named Cranio who has three brains. He always boasts of being three steps ahead of him and is a recurring figure in hallucinations. Given Sentry normally has three personalities in conflict with each other, he might be a representation of Bob being his own greatest enemy and the greatest threat to others.
- Secret Path (2016): The presence of a raven, recurring throughout the comic, represents Chanie's impending death.
Films — Animation
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): Judge Frollo is an allegory for religious fanaticism and hypocrisy, the people throughout history (and to the present day) who only seem to care about the actual tenets of their faith when using them as an excuse to hurt people.
- The Kidnapping of the Sun and the Moon: The dragon can represent anything bad and the hero can symbolize humanity's strength to fight back and restore peace.
- KPop Demon Hunters: The antagonists of the film serve as representations of the ugly truths of the Korean idol industry that otherwise go unaddressed by the story.
- Gwi-Ma is an embodiment of personal demons; that inner voice of shame and regret as he whispers in peoples' ears about their failures and flaws, growing stronger as he encourages self-destructive behavior as an escape. Inevitably, heeding the demon's words leads to a lifetime of pain and misery as he consumes who you truly are.
- More concretely, Gwi-Ma embodies the worst, most predatory aspects of the K-Pop industry. Finding talented but desperate artists like Jinu, he offers them power and success through promoting their music to the right ears, but eventually demands that they abandon the lives they once had, up to and including family, for their jobs. He shames and isolates his patrons until they believe the only option they have left is to continue their miserable servitude for his benefit. Meanwhile, he feeds his artists' audiences pleasing but shallow doses of sexually appealing idols, slowly convincing them that suppressing their sorrow and doubts through devotion to these idols is healthy, even liberating. And in the end, he doesn't care about the fans at all, triumphant as they throw themselves into his maw to be consumed, just as the exploiters in the industry couldn't care less about how obsessed or mentally ill certain fans become, so long as that addiction leads to their endless profit.
- The Saja Boys, meanwhile, represent the idols victimized by the industry, and the various forms of objectification and abuse they suffer in the name of fame. Other than Jinu, none of them have names, simply a role that reflects the public and industry perception of them (Abby is sexualized, Baby is infantilized, Romance encourages parasocial behavior, Mystery represents a lack of privacy). Jinu himself is a talented performer taken on by a greedy, gluttonous evil to enrich it at the cost of his family and his soul.
- The LEGO Movie: After the movie's big twist, it becomes clear that Lord Business represents how Finn views his father. This actually becomes a vital plot point during the climax, as The Man Upstairs realizing that his own son has cast him as the bad guy triggers a Heel Realization, which in turn leads to Lord Business having a Heel–Face Turn when he and Finn work together to give the story a happy ending.
- NIMONA (2023): The Director is the living personification of paranoia and the horrible things it drives people to do. She seeks to destroy everything she doesn't understand or can't control because they scare her, and she's too scared to get close enough to learn how baseless her fears are.
- In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the Wolf bounty hunter may appear to be symbolizing "death", as he gives an appearance usually associated with The Grim Reaper — he has sickles, a black poncho with a hood, and a face mark that resembles that of a skull. The Wolf's defeat of Puss after the cat learns he is on his last life of nine works as a symbolic reckoning with mortality after a life of reckless danger. Subverted when the Wolf reveals he is Death. Not metaphorically, rhetorically, poetically, theoretically, or any other fancy way. He is Death straight up, and he's here to reap Puss early because the cat didn't value any of his previous lives.
- Son of the White Horse: The three main dragons, representing the evil side effects of technological progress. Certain interpretations of the source tales also view Fanyűvő and his brothers under the same light, especially in the versions where they're villains. The movie obviously adopts a different approach to their portrayal, but they're still walking mythological symbols rather than individual, fleshed-out characters.
- South Park: Joining the Panderverse: Kathleen Kennedy is used as a representative for all of Disney and pretty much Hollywood in general (since that's how people treat her), the amount of control she has over the company being ridiculously exaggerated, and her response towards the backlash over their movies was to double down on diversity despite it resulting in declining profits. Cartman represents all obnoxious fans who do nothing but complain about the things they allegedly love and insist that "wokeness is ruining movies"; he was said to have been single-handedly responsible for every piece of hate mail Kennedy received. The Big Bad was a fusion of the two to demonstrate the bitter cycle of doubling down the two create.
- Spider-Man: Spider-Verse:
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Peter B can be seen as a commentary on how it feels watching Peter's life get destroyed repeatedly as he never gets married to the woman he loves, and keeps dealing with the same problems as an adult that he did in his youth. It stops being as relatable as it did when he was in his teens or twenties, and starts just being depressing.
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099, is seen as a representation of Marvel's seeming unwillingness to let Peter Parker avoid having his life turned into a constant train wreck. His core philosophy is every Spider in the multiverse has to suffer canon events (such as losing their Uncle Ben figure, having Venom antagonize them, or losing a police captain they're allied with) lest their universe be glitched out of existence, and is willing to go to murderous lengths to ensure that no one tries to stop them, even planning to hurt Miles Morales if it means preventing him from saving his dad from the Spot. To make the allegory even more obvious, he's The Comically Serious, is usually seen in darkly-lit rooms (since Marvel tends to favor a Darker and Edgier approach to the character), and refuses to back down even when there's some gaping holes in his logic due to the fact he's gone too far to stop. He's also a representation of the initial backlash towards Miles, as he dismisses the newest Spider as a pretender who didn't deserve his powers, outright calling him a mistake during their climatic chase (since the spider that bit Miles was from another universe and was never meant to bite him).
- Superman: Man of Tomorrow: The film leans into the immigration aspect of Superman's character, and the hero is therefore used as a metaphor for immigrants and foreigners along with Martian Manhunter, Lobo and Parasite.
- For all intents and purposes, Clark is an illegal immigrant who came to America as an infant and was secretly raised by a white American couple. Being a Human Alien, Clark has the appearance of a white man and therefore was able to blend in with society, but to do that meant hiding who he really was and what he could do with his powers. As an adult, he attempts to become a superhero, with people being somewhat suspicious of him at first, but the arrival of Lobo and the appearance of Martian Manhunter quickly transformed him into a beloved figure since, from the perspective of everyone else, he looks like a human with extraordinary powers who just defeated a dangerous foreign threat. This is shown by how Perry White insists that the story is no longer about the "flying man" but about the alien threats and this theme is reinforced when Superman goes to fight Parasite, with Lois ironically describing the hero as their last hope against an alien threat despite Parasite in truth being a mutated human. This leads Clark to reveal the truth about Parasite and his own origins as an alien, with his speech again being an unsubtle criticism towards real-life racist and xenophobic beliefs about foreigners.
- J'onn is made into a metaphor for immigrants whose natural appearance does expose them for being different and therefore have to work harder to blend in. His speech to Clark about how they need to hide who they are to survive can bring to mind any number of situations throughout history where a persecuted group needed to hide as many of their differences as they could.
- Parasite is made into a metaphor for Americans who are accused of being immigrants simply because they don't look "normal". Rudy is a war veteran and working-class white American who is simply trying to support his family, but is transformed into a purple monster by forces outside his control. As he mutates into something that seems less human, and due to the appearances of Lobo and Martian Manhunter, Rudy is perceived as an alien threat that must be destroyed while Superman, a Human Alien, is perceived as a saviour since despite his incredible powers he appears to be human to them instead of an alien.
- Lobo, meanwhile, lives up to every fear humanity has about aliens, making him a metaphor for how, just like anyone else in the world, some immigrants and foreigners are going to be untrustworthy and even dangerous. However Metropolis treats Lobo as the rule and assumes that all aliens are like him, instead of considering that he might be the exception.
- In Wish (2023), the film intended to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Disney, Asha's grandfather Sabino is a 100-year-old man whose wish is to become an entertainer and influence future generations, making him the Walt Disney Company's allegory for itself.
Films — Live-Action
- The Batman (2022): Bitter Nobody represents those disenfranchised by Gotham's elite due to their corruption.
- The ghost child from The Changeling (1980) represents the unsympathetic nature of justice. The ghost persecutes Senator Carmichael, who had stolen the ghost's life without his knowledge. Despite this, the ghost understands that Vengeance Feels Empty so it destroys its former home with John Russell still inside.
- The Dark Knight Trilogy:
- The Joker can be read as one of the most disturbing and terrifying examples of postmodern nihilism ever filmed. As a Terrorist Without A Cause, he embodies the ideological void of the 21st century—the kind of evil that no longer requires a cause or a banner in the aftermath of grand narratives and the ethical and moral failures of contemporary wars. He has no ideology, seeks neither power nor money, and lacks even something as coherent as a backstory or a real name; his only purpose is to expose the moral inconsistency of the system and, by extension, of human beings in general. This interpretation becomes even more disturbing and unsettling when we consider that the film was released in 2008, at the end of a decade marked by widespread distrust in institutions and the state, the ethical and moral collapse brought on by costly and perpetual wars, the Great Recession, the crisis of values, the fear of systemic breakdown, and the anxiety surrounding an uncertain future. The Joker did not appear in a vacuum; he emerged at the perfect moment for a villain whose message is "everything is rotten on the inside" to become iconic. In short, he is a figure who embodies the contemporary fear of losing our ethical and moral compass.
- Bane from The Dark Knight Rises is easily the face of ideological terrorism/jihadism in the post-9/11 era. Eerily reminiscent of real-life Middle Eastern jihadist groups, he is a fully radicalized zealot leading a heavily militarized organization. Raised in one of the worst prisons in the Middle East, Bane is entirely devoted to the ideology of Ra's al Ghul.
- Of the threat of extremism and full circle revolutions in general. Bane emerges from the shadows by playing on and manipulating the grievances of an unequal society to achieve his own private goals, using the complacency of Gotham's upper class to effectively isolate the city and put it under martial law. By directing the anger of his followers and the underprivileged towards the existing power structure, he's able to stifle opposition and raise an army that he uses to hunt dissidents and host show trials to distract others from his plans. His backstory shows that he uses the same prison he was trapped in to incarcerate and punish his enemies.
- Game of Death: The characters in the pagoda are this in the original version. One could ask if they spend all of their lives in the pagoda waiting for some challenger, however, they represent the formalized system of martial arts that Bruce Lee wanted to prove wrong. They are all beaten with some ease, however Kareem-Abdul Jabbar has an unknown fighting style that represents the highest level of martial arts.
- Godzilla himself started in Godzilla (1954) as an allegory for World War Two. Godzilla is an inhuman force which kills anybody by land, sea or air. The only way to defeat it is through a superweapon that should never have been invented.
- Grimcutty: The titular monster is a personification of parental worry (and to a degree, mistrust of their children). It appears to attack children whose parents are worried about them, often cutting them or harming them in such a way that justifies the worries of the parents, which in turn makes it more likely to appear to hurt the children further. The first child to be afflicted with it has his mother become so paranoid with the idea of him getting hurt that she eventually locks him up in a padded room.
- Manila in the Claws of Light: Julio is a metaphor for the hand-to-mouth Filipino poor, who are kept in hopeless situations by those in power and can only respond with either patience or small-scale violence.
- MonsterVerse:
- King Ghidorah, the Big Bad of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), serves as an allegory for anthropogenic climate change, with Ghidorah's unquenchable desire for domination over the Titans/Kaijus (who are often paralleled to the forces of nature) and speculated motive of negatively terraforming the Earth's environment to his own liking both compared to humanity's own blasé attitude toward the rest of the animal kingdom and the environment which manmade Global Warming is a product of. Heck, the King of the Monsters novelization specifically compares Ghidorah's extinction event-creating process to Global Warming... but just massively sped up. There's also the fact that Ghidorah was originally imprisoned in an Antarctic glacier, and he's only able to escape and ravage the world through humans intervening to melt/shatter his frozen prison (read: just like how Global Warming is causing the polar ice caps to melt and devastate the biosphere).
- While the majority of Earth's kaiju represent forces of nature, Skar King's more anthropomorphic design along with his greater emphasis as a loathsome Hate Sink (being a raging misogynist, ableist and enslaver) from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire embodies the egomania of fascist tyrants. It's probably not a coincidence that the film's Final Battle takes place in Rio de Janeiro — one of the most populous cities of Brazil, a country which has repeatedly struggled with slavery and authoritarianism ever since its founding in the 19th century.
- King Ghidorah, the Big Bad of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), serves as an allegory for anthropogenic climate change
- The Three-headed Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail can be seen as a Take That! towards bureaucracy. The body of the knight can only act once all three heads agree. But by that time, new developments have taken place that render their previous agreement useless. In this case, Sir Robin appeared, causing the Three Headed Knight to argue how to deal with him. But after reaching an agreement, Robin already left. Likewise, a large company or institution might run into trouble adapting to new technological advancements or other societal developments. When the administration of said company or institution finally decided how to deal with said developments, other developments have already taken place.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger is the embodiment of Generational Trauma. While Freddy was a child-killer when he was human, as a Nightmare Weaver he had since become Springwood's Dark Secret and the adults of the town have since tried to suppress the truth of his existence rather than confront it. At best, the adults ignore or gaslight the kids into thinking that Freddy is nothing more than a figment of their collective imagination. At worst, the adults will arrest, drug and/or institutionalize the kids (as was the case in The Dream Warriors and Freddy vs. Jason), doing everything they can to control the kids while leaving them all the more helpless against him.
- No Country for Old Men: Chigurh is one of the most terrifying examples of nihilism in film. He follows an unknown and arbitrary set of rules, and just as often his actions come down to literally flipping a coin.
- Oldboy (2003): Lee Woo-jin can be seen as an allegory to Fate itself; earlier in the film, while trying to find out who kidnapped him, Dae-su fills various notebooks with the names of people he's wronged and what slights he's committed against them, only for none of them to have Woo-jin's name. At the same time, anyone could have stumbled upon what Woo-jin and Soo-ah were doing in the classroom that day, and that person happened to be Dae-su.
- Pan's Labyrinth:
- Captain Vidal is fascism incarnate, in his obsessions with complete control of every aspect of his life, in securing a son only to carry on his name (as an allusion to the misogyny and patriarchal aspects of fascism), and then dying a glorious death (as a reference to fascism's glorification of war).
- According to Guillermo del Toro, the Pale Man represents the Catholic Church, which was highly complicit in Spanish fascism at the time the movie takes place. There is also the part about him sitting at a table loaded with all sorts of delicious food that he does not eat, but will kill and consume anyone who takes as much as an apple.
- Bob Barnes and Sergeant Elias in Platoon represent the opposite approaches to war, Oliver Stone describing them as the "angel and devil on Chris Taylor's shoulder". Elias represents the ideal military leader, respected on the battlefield, competent, and morally upstanding to the very end. Barnes, meanwhile, represents the very real brutality of winning at any cost, not caring about his own men beyond their use and committing heinous deeds to complete the mission.
- A Serbian Film: According to the film's director, Miloš represents Yugoslavia, being slowly and brutally destroyed by his involvement in the film's events, much like how the country collapsed throughout The Yugoslav Wars.
- Smile: The Smile Entity embodies a variety of things from post-traumatic stress, generational trauma, paranoia, repression, and mental illness. The Entity torments and gaslights its victim methodically and without mercy, making it look as though its victim is having a psychotic breakdown. While the victim is scrambling to find help or answers to their problem, all it does is convince everyone that the victim is dangerous to themselves and others while making sure that the victim can't trust anyone back, as the Entity routinely impersonates others just to mess with them. It all culminates in killing their victim in a manner confused for suicide while passing itself onto the witness it traumatizes, and the victim can only rid themselves of the Entity by passing it onto someone else by inflicting them with trauma.
- Terminator: Skynet is not just a fictional villain; it serves as a symbol of contemporary and existential fears about AI—loss of control, dangerous autonomous decision-making, and machines turning against the very species that created them. As an allegory, Skynet is not merely a villain but a narrative device that raises ethical and moral questions: What happens if we create something too powerful? What responsibility do those who develop military technology bear? What is the cost of unchecked scientific progress? All of this becomes even more frightening with the AI boom and the rise of generative AI taking center stage in The New '20s.
- In many films about the RMS Titanic, a handful of named characters take up traits, quotes or actions of different people onboard, to avoid having to spend time with lots of characters. Sometimes fictional characters are used to avoid Historical Villain Upgrade.
- Thunderbolts* (2025) : Bob Reynolds's (The Sentry) overall character and duel identities serve as several;
- The Sentry seems to be an expression of mania, bringing out Bob's delusions of grandeur and leading to him becoming overconfident, and also something of an addictive drug for the power high it gives, invoking Bob's past as a drug user.
- The Void is a physical manifestation of Bob's depression, a being of literal emptiness who breaks him down with thoughts of loneliness and despair. When Bob is nearly consumed by the darkness, the Thunderbolts are able to contain it by warmly embracing him, acting as a support group of sorts.
- He even has an "Allegorical Attack", as the Void's method of reducing people to shadows eerily invokes suicidal ideation, as it talks about subjection to this as a way of escaping from one's pain. However, given that those affected are instead trapped in their worst memories, this doesn't actually heal or fix anything.
- X-Men Film Series
- Across the First Class trilogy, Professor X represents empathy, and depending on the story, he can also be a figure of peace, hope or love. For X-Men: First Class, he's emblematic of serenity, and without his participation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the planet would've plunged into World War III (no Charles = no peace). For X-Men: Days of Future Past, his 1973 self must regain hope, otherwise by 2023, mutantkind is doomed to extinction (a hopeless past Xavier = a hopeless future for mutants). For X-Men: Apocalypse, his love is the only thing that can conquer fear (Jean Grey's trepidation over her Phoenix Force disappears when she senses the utmost trust the Professor has in her), hate and anger (the last two are felt by Magneto, but once he recalls how much he loves his old friend, he betrays Apocalypse); in this case, Charles = The Power of Love.
- Furthermore, Xavier's emotional state is a metaphor for America's mindset during the time period these movies depict. In 1962, the character's optimism is an extension of the hopeful outlook President Kennedy's administration tended to exude, whereas Charles' melancholia in 1973 is not unlike the general malaise American citizens felt while under the shadow of The Vietnam War. Xavier's descent into despair began in 1963, which is the same year Kennedy was assassinated — the end of "Camelot"note parallels the end of Professor X's school. At least in the Alternate Timeline, Charles starts to piece himself together again shortly after the Paris Peace Accords are signed. The '80s in the USA was an era of excess and materialism (both were regarded as not just acceptable, but desirable), so Xavier's vanity is at its peak in 1983, and we get to see much more of his lavish estate and everything he owns within its boundaries. The combination of his smug demeanour, dressing like he had just stepped off the set of Miami Vice, and driving around in a gorgeous, well-maintained vintage car announces to everyone that "I'm beautiful, I'm rich, and I love it."
- Across the First Class trilogy, Professor X represents empathy, and depending on the story, he can also be a figure of peace, hope or love. For X-Men: First Class, he's emblematic of serenity, and without his participation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the planet would've plunged into World War III (no Charles = no peace). For X-Men: Days of Future Past, his 1973 self must regain hope, otherwise by 2023, mutantkind is doomed to extinction (a hopeless past Xavier = a hopeless future for mutants). For X-Men: Apocalypse, his love is the only thing that can conquer fear (Jean Grey's trepidation over her Phoenix Force disappears when she senses the utmost trust the Professor has in her), hate and anger (the last two are felt by Magneto, but once he recalls how much he loves his old friend, he betrays Apocalypse); in this case, Charles = The Power of Love.
- The Thief: Toljan clearly symbolizes Josef Stalin. The Stalin tattoo on his chest is the most obvious sign. Katya and Sanya represent the Russian people, looking for a father figure/protector, meekly submitting and accepting his crimes as the Russian people submitted to Stalin.
Folklore and Legends
- Arthurian Legend abounds with characters who have become symbolic of certain virtues and vices. Arthur represents wisdom, Guinevere represents love, Lancelot represents courage, Mordred represents greed, Tristan represents destiny and Galahad represents purity.
- The Lambton Worm: The Worm has been read as a representing the effects of misrule and neglect. It comes into being when John Lambton, the young son of the lord, goes fishing on Sunday morning (instead of being in church like he would be supposed to), catches nothing but a hideous worm, and throws it down a well instead of disposing of it properly. Then he goes off to fight in foreign wars and leaves his land behind, which allows the Worm to grow into a huge, dangerous problem. Thus, the creature comes into being because of improper behavior on the lord's part, is allowed to grow strong and large because of his laziness and neglect, and is only dealt with for good when John Lambton comes back home to take responsibility for it.
Literature
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: Bruno is meant to represent a naïve Germany unaware of the actions of Nazis.
- The Divine Comedy: The Garden of Eden atop Purgatorio is filled with people who represent moral and religious concepts, some falling under Anthropomorphic Personification and some being too abstract to fall under a specific sub-trope:
- The twenty-four elders with wreaths on their head represent the books of the Old Testament of The Bible.
- The four green animals with six wings covered by eyes represent The Four Gospels.
- A griffin represents the conjoined divinity and humanity of Christ.
- Three women colored red, green, and white represent the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and are followed by four women in purple representing the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude.
- Two elders appear in together, one being a doctor to represent Luke's Acts of the Apostles and the other a swordbearer to represent Saint Paul's letters.
- Four humble men who follow without comment represent the writers of the lesser epistles.
- At the end of the parade, an old man who looked as if he is asleep advances, representing the Book of Revelation.
- It: At IT's core, the villain is an allegory for trauma, specifically generational trauma, childhood trauma, and repressed trauma. IT mainly targets children and IT deliberately uses ambush strategies and fear tactics to get what IT wants most. Although the Losers Club are able to defeat IT, IT retreats and the losers make a vow to return if IT ever shows signs of coming back. As adults, the Losers cannot remember IT and they have to recover their memories before confronting IT again.
- The idea of forgetting IT is akin to dissociative amnesia, where a traumatized person cannot remember the thing that traumatized them as a defense mechanism. Each of the losers has their own form of childhood trauma as their bullies torment them, neglected by their families, sexually abused, and racially abused, something that IT has no issue with exploiting and IT often appears when the Losers are at the peak of fear (something IT does deliberately to improve the taste of his victims). Before IT hunts Eddie Corcoran, Eddie decides to spend the night at the park because he is scared of his abusive step-father and IT exploits the trauma of his brother's death.
- Henry Bowers also sees IT when he's traumatized by the deaths of Vic and Belch at IT's claws, Henry represses the memories but still expresses it in small ways as he's terrified of the dark. Under IT's influence, Henry tries to kill the Losers but is ultimately defeated. This is also akin to trauma, as childhood trauma is one of many factors in psychopathy and the development of serial killers.
- IT resurfaces every 30 years and the town is somehow conditioned by IT to overlook the monster's activities, despite IT's activities being widely documented but never pinned down to IT's presence. Derry is haunted and is traumatized by IT but the town allows IT to be unwittingly passed on to their children when they grow up. Like how a traumatic event is passed on from one generation to the next through their genetics.
- The fight against IT also comparable to treating trauma. As the Losers have to confront their traumas before they can let go of it and move on from it. Beverly married someone in her adulthood who resembled her father but moved on to Ben after confronting IT.
- The novel Kimmy by Alyson Greaves (best known for the The Sisters Of Dorley series) uses the titular androids and their role in society as a very clear allegory for trans women and transmisogyny (the intersection of sexism and transphobia that specifically affects trans women). Kimmys are fully sapient and self-aware women with rich internal lives, dreams, aspirations, and everything else that humans have, but in practice they are treated as lesser than women. Kimmys are women that can be abused, mistreated, raped, and treated like garbage because everyone knows they're not "real" women and thus they don't deserve respect. Much of the narration in the early chapters is dedicated to pointing out all the ways in which Kimmys are easily distinguished from "real" women, much in the same way transphobes claim that they can easily tell cis and trans women apart at a glance while really just pointing to meaningless surface-level traits. The only place that the Kimmys can find refuge to talk, be themselves, pick their own names, or even just dissociate from the world is online, mirroring how many trans women find community online, but with the constant threat of being found and destroyed, or some of them just randomly disappearing with no way to find out what happened to them. And if all of that was not enough, the main character is a man turning into a Kimmy unit who actually finds that she likes being a Kimmy, and dreams of a future where she and her sisters can enjoy their lives as Kimmys without the constant abuse they suffer just for existing.
- Matilda: Miss Trunchbull represents abusive teachers as a whole, and was reportedly based on several of Roald Dahl's own teachers and experiences with corporal punishment.
- Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo has characters portraying the status of the Philippines and its people during its colonial era.
- Atlantis in the dialogues of Plato, Timaeus and Critias. Atlantis was an empire that embodied everything Plato saw as flaws that an ideal nation state should avoid. This is why despite all of Atlantis' power it still ultimately is unable to overcome Athens and sinks beneath the seas.
- In Sailor Nothing, the Yamiko are intrusive thoughts, the violent, crude urges that people naturally feel but suppress. Without this self-control, the Yamiko just rampage based on their latest whim and have no ability to plan or cooperate.
- Lord Eddard Stark from the A Song of Ice and Fire books is erroneously considered the poster child for Honor Before Reason. Never mind that he tried to stop a usurpation by out-usurping a usurper. "Honest and honorable" Ned Stark was also a man of many secrets, and many of those are coming to the fore after his death.
Live-Action TV
- Earth Alliance President William Clark seldom appears in Babylon 5 and is more an allegorical embodiment of how a democracy can be corrupted into fascism.
- The Boys (2019):
- Vought International is an allegory for modern-day commercialism. Vought International has no integrity and is content to turn a blind eye to Supe misdemeanors and outright deaths because the supes are too valuable and profitable an asset to see locked behind bars and will use corporate intervention to either silence witnesses or throw money at the problem to ensure it stays away. Vought will only publically condemn the problem to pay lip service and have no issues with ignoring the problem altogether behind closed doors. As shown with Compound-V and Soldier Boy, Vought has the power to make a difference but would rather use their power to make money than do anything practical.
- Homelander embodies the dark underbelly of America by voicing its most controversial standpoints, i.e. the America First policy, hypermasculinity, religious fundamentalism, reproductive rights, and the war on terror. His name is based on Homeland Security, and he even wears a cape in the style of the American flag with eagle imagery on his costume, and while he is picky enough to curl up his cape when he sits so as not to sit on the American flag, it becomes drenched in the blood of his victims on more than one occasion.
- Soldier Boy's pretty much the physical embodiment of toxic masculinity and the US military.
- As the embodiment of toxic masculinity, Soldier Boy matches the criteria for the stereotypical Manly Man, i.e. has a beard, hot-blooded, muscular, and stoic, but these traits are shown to be unhealthy. His hot-bloodedness makes him aggressive and abusive toward his teammates in Payback, he discriminates against the non-whites and non-heterosexuals, he's sexist and misogynistic, and his bottled-up emotions are now symbolically expressed through nuclear blasts whenever his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is triggered by a Russian song called "Escape".
- As the embodiment of the US military, Soldier Boy is one of the most powerful and influential forces in the world, but he accidentally kills innocent people with nuclear explosions and then acts like he’s the good guy for the most part. Homelander's response to the danger he represents also mirrors the Trump Administration's "nothing to see here" response to the then-emerging COVID-19 pandemic.
- Supes: The supes in the series are used as a critique of celebrity culture, namely the greed for fame, how their egos outpace their capabilities, and how their misdeeds are usually covered up through corporate intervention.
- Blue Hawk's the embodiment of police brutality and his costume resembles a motorcycle police officer's uniform. While Blue Hawk insists that his actions aren't racially motivated, he displays police brutality by revealing that he's quick to anger, relies on lying to save himself from the consequences of his actions, and has no qualms using his powers on unarmed black civilians. He's also believed to be based on George Zimmerman.note
- Todd, the new husband of the ex-wife of Mother's Milk, personifies people who peddle baseless conspiracy theories and blindly follow people with personality cults built around them. In Todd's case, he's an overzealous fan of Homelander who tries to push his beliefs onto his stepdaughter Janine, which disturbs her father Marvin who has seen what Homelander is really like. He also follows the baseless conspiracy theory that Starlight is sex trafficking children, which he got from the Homelander rally he brought his stepdaughter to, one that is reminiscent of Trump rallies. Notably, at the end of the Season 3 finale, he has become so devoted to supporting Homelander that he is the first person who cheers after the supe executes a protestor in broad daylight.
- Breaking Bad: Walter White can be read as an allegory of the paradigmatic criminal produced by late capitalism, embodying the mutation of crime into a business-like, technical, and deeply individualistic model characteristic of 21st century postmodernity, where moral certainties dissolve and identity becomes a personal project. His transformation does not stem from a criminal inheritance but from the logic of the "entrepreneur of the self", which turns knowledge, risk, and productivity into commodities. He responds to a system that precarizes him—an underpaid teacher, ill, and without a safety net—pushing him to reinvent himself as an economic actor within a highly globalized illicit market. Unlike the criminals of the past, Walter does not operate under communal notions or family rituals but under technical rationality, optimization, efficiency, and profit maximization. He replicates within crime the dynamics of the postmodern era: outsourcing violence, scaling operations, seeking monopoly, negotiating like a corporation, and reframing morality as a malleable instrument.
- Cobra Kai: Sensei Kim Da-Eun serves as a societal critique of tiger parenting, an authoritarian form of strict parenting to ensure the success of their children, which is common in East Asian countries. Being raised by a ruthless Tang Soo Do teacher, Da-Eun also inherits all of her grandfather's ruthlessness. Her treatment of Tory, a Westerner, borders on from emotional and psychological abuse to full-on maltreatment. Season 6 takes this a step further, as she herself was subjected to the same treatment by her own grandfather, which leads into a cycle of abuse that lasts for generations. One would be left to wonder if Master Kim and his blood-relatives are a Big, Screwed-Up Family.
- Doctor Who:
- The Skithra from "Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror" are a distillation of all of Thomas Edison's flaws with none of his redeeming qualities — they both exploit inventors like Tesla for their own benefit, but unlike the merely-less-prolific Edison, the Skithra don't create anything at all.
- The Absorbaloff from "Love and Monsters" is an allegory for the darker aspects of fandom culture, specifically the "super-fans" who take Doctor Who too seriously and ruin the fun for everyone else through their obsession with the show.
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: Warren the Eagle's the embodiment of intrusive thoughts and insecurities. Warren feeds Yellow Guy's fears that Red Guy and Duck hate him and he literally crawls into Yellow Guy's brain and ruins his happy place. After removing him from Yellow Guy's head, Red Guy and Duck sing about how everyone has a worm in their brain that tells them negative and upsetting things (such as how Red Guy can't wear denim and that Duck is responsible for many deaths after forging documents) and they should be ignored.
- Fallout (2024): Per Word of God, Vault Dweller-turned-Action Survivor Lucy Maclean is meant to represent Fallout players who play Good characters, and who derive their fun from roleplay and Video Game Caring Potential. Whereas The Ghoul, an utterly ruthless One-Man Army mercenary gunslinger, represents murderhobo players who Play the Game, Skip the Story, who play Evil characters and who don't really care for NPCs unless they have some nice loot on them.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7", this is discussed; while trying to make a new villain, Dennis explains why they chose Karen White. According to Dennis, entitled white women are the only group they can vilify for their movie but the gang finds her too "cunty" for their movie and decide to switch Karen with a flood to avoid controversy. Instead, they now find the character unlikable and eventually make "Don Cheadle" the director, who turns the film into a documentary about white saviors.
- In Jessica Jones (2015), Kilgrave is pretty much the personification of stereotypically masculine vices, often associated with rape, entitlement, and negative aggression.
- Just Beyond: In episode "My Monster", The Squeember is a physical representation of stress and anxiety.
- Kamen Rider Outsiders: The AI Zein serves as a societal critique of real life dictators and authoritarian leaders in recorded history, a cautionary tale on how democracies can easily deteriorate into authoritarianism so long the leader stays in power and silence any opposition by any means necessary. From a Hobbesian perspective, it's widely believed that its autocratic mentality can be seen as a necessary evil to pacify mankind's worst impulses, given that Kamen Rider runs on the theme of Humans Are the Real Monsters.
- Patty from Kevin Can F**k Himself represents the viewers who wish to have friends and participate in wacky sitcom hijinks. That is until she is shaken out of her complacency and made to understand how Kevin's antics are making Allison miserable and how her inaction makes her practically an accomplice.
- The Sopranos:
- Tony Soprano can be read as an allegory of the 20th century individual trapped in a 21st century that no longer has a place for him. He is the heir to a mafia order built on traditions, codes of honor, ethnic belonging, and stable community structures, yet he lives in an era that has emptied those pillars of meaning and rendered obsolete the closed systems of authority that once gave coherence to his identity. His constant anxiety, panic attacks, and frustration stem precisely from trying to sustain a model of life that is collapsing before his eyes: a family criminal organization that no longer controls the markets, a younger generation that disregards rituals, a neighborhood being globalized, and a capitalism devoid of loyalty that devours even traditional criminals. In this way, Tony embodies the subject born into a world ordered by robust traditions but forced to survive in a liquid modernity where those certainties have dissolved, turning him into a living anachronism struggling to keep alive a form of crime, masculinity, and cultural identity that time has already condemned to extinction.
- During "Kennedy and Heidi", Tony essentially becomes a living allegory of postmodern nihilism. What happens to Tony after "Kennedy and Heidi" is not simply that he embraces nihilism; rather, the entire series, through him, becomes a mirror of what postmodern thought has diagnosed as the condition of contemporary man: the impossibility of believing in any narrative that gives meaning to existence. For decades, Tony tries to sustain two worlds at the same time—the suburban family man and the mob boss—not because he is a hypocrite in the simple sense, but because he needs both narratives to be true in order to avoid confronting the void beneath them. What "Kennedy and Heidi" destroys is any remaining narrative of hope within him: Tony kills Chrissy, feels relief instead of guilt, takes peyote in the desert, and at the moment of sunrise what Tony “understands” is not that life has meaning, but exactly the opposite: that it doesn’t, and that he is perfectly okay with that.
- Likewise, the DiMeo Crime Family can be read as a very clear allegory for the Silent and Baby Boomer generations trapped in a 21st-century world where the American Dream, traditional American prosperity, authority, sense of community, and traditional American male roles no longer mean anything in the face of an increasingly globalized and individualistic world.
- Tony Soprano can be read as an allegory of the 20th century individual trapped in a 21st century that no longer has a place for him. He is the heir to a mafia order built on traditions, codes of honor, ethnic belonging, and stable community structures, yet he lives in an era that has emptied those pillars of meaning and rendered obsolete the closed systems of authority that once gave coherence to his identity. His constant anxiety, panic attacks, and frustration stem precisely from trying to sustain a model of life that is collapsing before his eyes: a family criminal organization that no longer controls the markets, a younger generation that disregards rituals, a neighborhood being globalized, and a capitalism devoid of loyalty that devours even traditional criminals. In this way, Tony embodies the subject born into a world ordered by robust traditions but forced to survive in a liquid modernity where those certainties have dissolved, turning him into a living anachronism struggling to keep alive a form of crime, masculinity, and cultural identity that time has already condemned to extinction.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series's Freudian Trio: Kirk represents leadership, Spock represents logic, and McCoy represents emotion.
- Star Trek: Discovery: President Laira Rillak's a perfect representation of the problems that the Federation has always faced, in that she preaches about unity and goodwill in public, but in private she's The Needs of the Many (even if Jerkass Has a Point about Michael's trauma) and concerned with military prowess and getting everyone in under the Federation again.
- Stranger Things: Vecna, the Big Bad of Seasons 4 and 5, is a clear allegory for mental illness and suicide. He specifically targets people who have some kind of personal trauma or other issues, causes them to have symptoms of depression, and induces terrifying hallucinations. Their horrific appearance when he kills them also alludes to what happens to people who end up jumping off of buildings or bridges.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In episode "He's Alive", Hitler is the literal manifestation of hatred and prejudice, with his return being only possible when Peter attempts to revive the Nazi movement in his city. Once Peter is killed at the end of the episode, Hitler simply returns to the shadows to seek out another Neo-Nazi. As Ron Serling puts it, Hitler is alive and immortal so long as people continue to practice hatred and prejudice.
Music
- Bear Ghost: The titular creatures in "Sirens" are used as an allegory for depression and addiction. Sirens are known for luring sailors to their doom with their sweet soothing voices, just as addiction and depression can tempt people into self-destruction.
- While at first Eminem's Slim Shady character was a way to express his Hair-Trigger Temper, self-loathing and desire to say things to piss people off, Eminem claimed that as time went on, he began to imagine Slim as the personification of his own fame. This is especially apparent in "When I'm Gone", where Slim kills himself in order to become Marshall again (allegorising how Eminem needed to step out of the spotlight for the sake of his own mental health), and in his Career Resurrection album Relapse, a Concept Album where Slim's murder rampages serve as an allegory both for the life-destroying effects of fame, and for the way that fame pushes people into the clutches of drug addiction.
- During U2's Zoo TV Tour, Bono invented three stage personas, each with their own meaning.
- The first is The Fly, a stereotypical rock star with Non Conformist Dyed Hair, dark clothing, and bulky sunglasses. The Fly parodies the egomania that often came with rock stardom.
- In the US tours, he went on stage as the Mirror Ball Man, who dressed in a shiny silver suit, a cowboy hat, and a southern accent to match. Mirror Ball Man represents greedy TV personalities, often televangelists, who are more interested in money than the values they claim to believe in.
- The final is MacPhisto, who replaced Mirror Ball Man outside of the US. MacPhisto was a devil-like character who spoke with a posh European accent, wore a gold suit, and slathered on heavy makeup. Bono has stated that this is what The Fly becomes after twenty-five years in the business, becoming increasingly hypocritical and materialistic.
Tabletop Games
- In Magic: The Gathering the ancient sphinx Azor represents colonialism, specifically the conceit that it's done to benefit the colonized — he travels between planes remaking their governance into what he considers to be perfect, orderly systems, and when chaos and suffering result because of his interventions he blames the people for failing to live up to his designs.
Azor: I fixed this plane–
Vraska: This plane was never broken! - In the original Snakes & Ladders game Moksha Patam, ladders represented good deeds and snakes represented vices, hence why ladders improve one's status in the game and snakes set them back.
Theater
- Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto has Angelo, a Florentine commoner who befriends Cesare Borgia at school. As his name implies, he's angelic, and often represents a more pure view of the situation than what occurs to the other characters, who are used to the Crapsack World of politics in 15th-century Italy. As soon as Cesare hears his name, he sings a song about how it means "Angel", and that leads him to think about how far the Vatican is from the purity it should have. Angelo also isn't afraid to challenge upper-class characters on their views — Cesare himself doesn't mind a little disputatio in the classroom, but others aren't so nice. Cesare ends up having to rescue Angelo quite a few times until the end where Angelo returns the favor, stepping in front of a dagger for Cesare.
- Medieval morality plays tended to feature a character called the Vice, who was a personification of a sin, such as Covetousness, Lust, or Gluttony. While originally played for drama, the Vice was eventually played for comedy and tended to be the most popular character in the play.
- In A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche is the classical antebellum south that's dying away, and Stanley is the new, more industrial south that's emerged since the then-recent end of World War 2. Neither of them are exactly sympathetic.
Web Animation
- The Amazing Digital Circus
- Pomni, as a newcomer who hasn't been exposed to everyone's flaws for an extended period, provides both an Audience Surrogate of experiencing the zaniness of the circus, and being a more unbiased ear as she gets to know the other characters. She ultimately becomes a grounded representation of consideration and care for others, willing to help but trying her best not to overstep her boundaries and willing to call out her friends flaws. Best shown in episode 7, where even after the fallout between her and Jax from episode 6, she hasn't given up on him. She reaches out to Jax for help, and gets him to join them to possibly escape, saving him from Abstracting, and giving him some confidence.
- Caine is, in essence, the embodiment of the proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". He genuinely is not out to hurt anybody and wants to help the Players feel better about being with him and the Circus by helping them with their issues but he is poisoning the very people he wants to help. Whether it's because he is impatient, he cannot understand a problem more deeply, he's so confident in his solutions that he cannot see they aren't end-all-be-all, and/or so overwhelming invasive or desperate that he's liable to make problems worse without understanding what went wrong before. Compare with Pomni, who eventually represents the opposite approach of reasonable understanding and boundaries.
- I, Pet Goat II: All the characters featured on this short, with the sole exception of George Bush and Barack Obama, seem to be interpreted as different kind of allegories.
- JaidenAnimations: The characters chosen to represent the psychics Jaiden visited are based on her experiences with them. Maya Fey represents the psychic who was the sweetest and most optimistic, Sabrina represents the psychic who was the most curt and bitter, and Chihaya Mifune represents the psychic who was the most expensive.
- Knights of Guinevere
- Princess Guinevere is one of the art and characters created by massive megacorporations, serving as the face of a cruel and exploitative company, while meant to represent innocence, a kind spirit, and childlike wonder. Unlike most examples, Guinevere is as genuine as can be with her intentions and is positioned as both a tool and a victim of her creator's malicious ideas.
- Olivia Park seems to be an analogy of corporations that mentally torture and exploit those with creative talent (artists, writers, musicians, etc.), all to capitalise on a character until none of its original purpose is left, turning the once beautiful creation into nothing more than a cash cow.
- MAN: The man represents the destruction of nature by humanity.
- MeatCanyon: Tony the Tiger in Breakfast on a Wednesday is a physical stand-in for addictive behavior/poor habits. When Joshua tries to eat healthier, Tony shows up and convinces him to instead eat a bowl of sugary cereal. A brief moment even shows Tony as Joshua's voice-actor in a costume, representing how Tony is really Joshua's own desire to continue his bad habits.
- Melvin's Macabre: In "EARWAX", the parasite appears to represent a manipulative friend/partner who provokes an otherwise innocent person to their Rage Breaking Point for the purpose of playing the victim, convincing Melvin's doctor to kill himself. In this vein, Angela, in taking pity on the parasite despite Melvin's warnings, is the exact type of person who would fall for this sort of manipulation.
- ONE. (2020): The cast represents the different aspects of what you would find in Object Shows.
- The Second Batch are the typical contestants for more light-hearted but run-of-the-mill contests. This is because their existence sums up to being just their object and nothing more due to coming from a world where they must hide their sentience from the co-inhabiting humans. As such, they are direct Foils to The First Batch since they have nothing better to do but compete.
- The Third Batch already by looking at them are the definition of joke characters from Joke Shows as their off-putting character designs and quirks are never meant to be taken seriously. They serve as comedic relief, which really didn't help the contestants' situation, and were eliminated one by one until the finale.
Web Comics
- In Koan of the Day, every single one of the characters is allegorical.
- The Order of the Stick: The Snarl, a world-wrecking, soul-destroying Eldritch Abomination that was created when the gods got into an argument over how exactly to create the world, is noted by Word of the Giant in collected editions to represent a game group falling apart because of disagreements.
- In Three Jaguars, the three jaguars are in fact personalities facets of the artist/writer.
Web Original
- Find Out Your Dragon Name As Long As It Isn't Rugarth Because That One Is Mine: Tyndallion, the oceanic dragon, is an allegory for the ocean itself — a Wild Card who both aids and wrecks ships, who can wreak mass destruction like it's nothing, and whom sailors dread but also pray to for good fortune.
- The Homestuck Epilogues: Fitting the fanfiction metaphor, the narrators for both timelines represent the kind of authors that write it:
- Ultimate Dirk is the fan that writes Darker and Edgier and canon-compliant fics, mixing Fanon Discontinuity with Start My Own when the work they like heads in a direction they don't agree with.
- Muse Calliope is the fan that enjoys writing fluff, AU, and shipping fics, even if the results are out of character. Despite being in control of a universe they "know" isn't the real deal, they still see it as just as living as the true universe.
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Lawyer Kong acts as a living embodiment of Nintendo's obsessive compulsive enforcement of their copyrighted properties. He even goes so far as erecting a firewall that separates Nintendo-owned characters from SMG4's characters alongside third-party characters and maintaining the family-friendly facade by force.
