i feel like a reason people portray harry weirdly and inacurately is partially because of the player's actions/options but i also feel like a reason people portray harry inaccurately is also because they default to portraying him under a certain moral umbrella of "good" or "bad" with the traits that come with it rather than trying to portray his actual traits individually. i think a good example of this would be how people portray harry's relationship with touch and physical intimacy; people know that pre-martinaise harry was a power tripping asshole so they [[apparently?]] portray him as a sort of rapey drunkard and make him more horrible than he probably was, they know that when harry wakes up in martinaise he has no memory of his past life or identity and flip the morality of it and somewhat infantilize him making him this golden retriever type who is innocently touch starved. because bad touch is bad and good touch is good.
in reality we see he almost never initiates positive physical contact with others and the closest we get to hearing or seeing about him having sexual physical contact with someone else in particular whatsoever is his memories of dora [[?]] or arguably when he can touch a corpse's penis. pretty much every single time we see him positively physically interact with other people it's because someone else initiated or suggested it. kim holds his hand out for harry to shake, kim suggests an aces high, kim holds his fist out for harry to fistbump, kim puts his hand on harry's shoulder and pats him on the back, lily holds out lamby for harry to press his face against, jean wraps his arm around harry to help him to the coupris. the only time we see harry decide on his own to initiate positive physical contact it can lead to him having a flashback. all other instances of him initiating physical contact are violent. the only time[[s]] where it's unknown/arguable if harry suggests or willingly initiates positive physical contact is the idle animations for him and kim as well and him and cuno that happen after ~20 minutes of inactivity, because there's no dialogue or anything really indicitive of who suggests it.
because harry's complex relationship with physical touch isn't an inherent indicator of his morality i think that's what may make it more difficult for some people to portray — plus, they probably pay more attention to the things harry says and thinks [[which include sexual intrusive thoughts and "i want to have fuck with you"]] rather than what he actually does and draw conclusions from it due to the lack of content of harry having positive physical contact or sexual contact with other people. although I'm quite sure that shoving characters under a moral umbrella of "good" or "bad" while given "good" or "bad" traits respectively with their actions being seen as either justifiable or deplorable [[respectively]] isn't anything exclusive to harry or even the way people interpret disco elysium in general, it's still just a little dissappinting that with a game that is incredibly well written and commonly renowned as one of if not the best written media in modern times and with a protagonist that can provide such a diverse experience based off of skills and choices yet is undeniably his own character with thoughts and feelings outside of the players choices, people still can't seem to get him right even with the flexibility of characterisation that the game gives the player.
[[if i said or recalled something incorrectly feel free to correct me]]
