People tend to misunderstand Dwight Schrute.
No, I'm not defending his behavior, I'm not criticizing the other characters for lolcowing him, that's all pretty clear, and I think most people understand, correctly, that there's no moral high ground there.
What I do mean is, people misunderstand what it means, that Dwight is seriously into several fandoms. It's the otaku fallacy that's common in Japan: otaku have a reputation of being fanatical to the point of violence about their favorite media, of being dangerously unpredictable, supposedly anything could set them off, if it happens to contradict one of their allegedly inscrutable fandom opinions.
With Dwight, this is usually played for laughs, and is part of the way they lolcow him, intentionally trying to enrage him for their own entertainment. I'm not a fan of The Office (not just because I narrowly avoided becoming Dwight Schrute IRL, but also because Steve Carrell is so incredibly good at making Michael convincing, that I can't bear to hear or see Michael onscreen), but enough of it has been inflicted on me, and I've heard and read enough discussion of it, to realize that some people think Dwight is unstable, egotistical, and socially awkward BECAUSE OF HIS FANDOM.
The opposite is actually true, both about Dwight and about otaku. There are so many fans out there, not harming anyone, just living their lives and enjoying their media, millions of them. What's actually happened is that fandom is so big now, that a significant number of people who are just plain assholes, for the same reason anyone becomes an asshole, are now also in fandom.
And so, when people outside fandom notice that an asshole they know is some kind of superfan, they assume (perhaps because of their negative opinion of fandom) that the person is an asshole because of their fandom. They assume the correlation is the causation. Maybe the asshole they're looking at is more vocal about their fandom than less self-centered fans… but maybe they found it out by prying, or by accident. In any case, they assume that the two things they dislike about that person are related.
It's kind of like someone hearing horror stories about Thanfiction or Ms.Scribe, and assuming that that is what all fandom is like, all the time. But it helps them to justify hating on, or mocking, or lolcowing, the asshole who's also a superfan. So they don't think too hard about their assumptions.
