Then in Drum Island there's the fantasy where Sanji and Luffy are evil for no reason. (Or the Boa Hancock fantasy where Luffy is some bishie dream.)

There's a good prompt: has anyone in your campaigns ever had their reputation get out of control and misinterpreted by someone? Good or bad.

Well, one of us was a evil guy, a assassin with his goal explicitely being to kill hundreds of peoples to surpass the record for highest victim counnt by established by the founder of his assassin clan. but either because of the others party members preventing him from doing certains things, bad rolls, or because of coîncidence and circumstance leading to the killing he did manage to do ending up having good consequences, he eventually became know as a hero.
his inability to succeed when he tried to do something bad became sort of a running gag.

sounds a lot like a Team Rocket member character to me. established as an evil force through backstory. but only competent at doing good things for the world.

well he was into less petty things than "trying to steal the same damn pikachu" but he was about as successful as them.

Just recently my party had to deal with a camp of soldiers who had apparently heard we got a royal commendation for beating up a bunch of their friends and fellow soldiers and townsfolk. In actuality we had rescued a bunch of people from some secret zhentarim prisons in the capitol, and had uncovered zhentarim involvement with some of the nobles. it took helping the camp deal with a sudden zombie menace released from an underground fortress under the camp to getthem to actually talk with us, after weeks of being semi politely stonewalled. It was also a bit of a jarring shift since we were going to the camp directly from the city we helped and were practically local heroes in.

...he REALLY should have quit while he was ahead. If he isn’t careful he might only be a head from now on.

I went there, do with me what you will!

Yeah, that's roughly the point where I, as a GM, would decide the player/character has had enough warnings. He's going to get wrecked.

he should just let go, but keep digging deeper and deeper.

I had a paladin, who became a Knight of the Chalice, basically knightly devil hunters, serious bonuses against evil outsiders. You would rise in ranks based on a lot of things, including the amount of Hit Dice an evil outsider had when you slew them compared to yours.

Devil children would consider this man the boogeyman if they existed. He did more than 20d6 bonus damage a swing against evil outsiders and gods help you if he used smite evil.

Either way, his reputation around devils became legendary and they did not want to mess with him to point of teleporting away when they knew he was coming.

Holy crap.

I wonder how much damage that'd do.