Check the manual for Super Mario Bros. The original on NES.

Mario is described as "The hero of our story (maybe)"

Which is kind of a weird way to describe the main character.

I remember a comic where one character says "Why are there so many monsters in this dungeon?!"

The other says "because they live here."

And the first character says "oh. ...ooooooohhhh...."

One example: the early-80s arcade game Elevator Action, in which you play a secret agent who abseils to the top floor of an enemy building and has to grab secret files and make his way down to a getaway car on the ground floor. Well, that’s how it’s described. In reality, you’re a spree shooter rampaging through an office.

It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.

In Halo, you can kill an elite squad commander and the grunts will run and cower. Halo wins once again.

uncharted is the worst for this because the fights add basically nothing. the games are great humourous adventure serials occasionally broken up by obligatory murderous rampages. after my first playthrough of uncharted 2 it showed that i had done over 200 headshots alone. friend of mine had something like 1500.

My flatmate used to call that Tomb Raider (the first of the new trilogy) "PTSD Simulator". It's as you say, the first few deaths are entirely survival-driven, with her constantly crying and then she becomes an emotionless one-woman army.

Yeah, it was funny how they tried to create some narrative arc about how she reacts to killing, and it just made the whole thing even weirder

I couldn’t keep playing that game after the first few hours. It felt like some kind of Lara Croft torture simulator fetish thing and made me feel icky.

It bothers me because TR2013 didn't have to be like that. The dogs were challenging and scary. The puzzles were good. The bow and melee combat was tense. Hunting and exploration could've played a bigger part, the game so rarely took you off the rails and it was good when it did.

The game could've been made with killing humans being rare dramatic moments, with the guns being tools of last resort.

Also, you don’t want to know what she thinks of trans people

Yes, I played the first video game. She was slowly becoming a sociopath in that one. By the third one, she is a sociopath.

DC's Poison Ivy is always one of the best examples of this.

I want to say she is from the 70s? And "evil lady eco terrorist" is both sexy and evil. Except, as time went on, more and more of the readers/viewers started to REALLY like the lady who murders the patriarchy while destroying chemical factories and oil refineries to protect the planet. So she became more of a plant monster and DC Editorial learned how many of us are into bondage and so forth. Which has led to the modern day where she is basically an anti-villain, at best, alongside her lesbian lover Harley. Although the Harley Quinn show did a great job of playing with that with everyone more or less thinking her an annoying goodie two shoes even though she is torturing and murdering children and whatever else her background atrocity of the week is.

But a lesser known example that might actually be one of my favorite movies at this point is Donnie Yen's Raging Fire. Yen plays the hero cop, as he always does, who is older but has morals and butts heads with his bosses who are too political. Except that, years prior to the movie, he was on a case with his protege and partner and they were told to do whatever it took to find a rich business man. Oh noes! His entire unit accidentally kills a suspect and now then Oh Noes, Donnie narced on them because of his morals so they went to prison and had a REAL bad time.

And now they are out and killing the corrupt cops and business people who betrayed them. Also it is basically Heat (right down to getting caught because the psycho killed a hooker) and the movie does a REAL good job of showing why Tse's criminal is the way he is and why Yen's cop is pushed to his breaking point and outright fighting the system he is supposed to uphold when his loved ones are in danger.

Until the final sequence which is the bank robbery from Heat. Except the writers realized the CCP is REALLY not going to like a movie that is this anti-cop so suddenly they are mowing down civilians left and right and lobbing grenades everywhere just to make sure you understand these ex-cops are actually the bad guys. And Donnie Yen and his CCP mouthpiece ass still has it.

Its a deeply problematic movie, like most of Donnie Yen's post 2010s work, but it is also incredibly fascinating when you think of it from the perspective of sympathetic villains and state mandated "tone". Also, like ALL of Donnie Yen's work, it is a beautiful spectacle of martial arts coming from a guy who is even more frustratingly charming than Tom Cruise.

I don't read many comics, but there was a Wonder Twins run by Mark Russell that was amazing.

The villain had a plan to scramble everyone's identity on Earth, so one day you could wake up and be in a horrible economic situation. His thinking was that with the deadline approaching, people would have to work to make the world more fair for everyone.

The real treasure was the personality disorder we developed along the way

"We named the dog Indiana"

Along with Nathan Drake for exactly the same reason.

Have you not seen those movies that end up saying "if we kill the big bad, we're no better than them" after mowing down countless faceless mobs