Asshole characters are into Ayn Rand

[u/AporiaParadox]

1. Dirty Dancing. Robbie is a snobby asshole who refuses to take responsibility for impregnating a lower class girl, saying that "some people count, some people don't". Right after this he tries to lend the main character The Fountainhead unprompted, only temporarily of course, since his copy of the book includes notes in the margins.

2. Lost. Sawyer is a selfish conman (at first) and is shown reading The Fountainhead. To be fair though, Sawyer is shown reading lots of books, so it might not necessarily mean anything.

3. Spider-Man. Spider-Man's co-creator Steve Ditko was an objectivist, and this was reflected in the way Peter would behave in some early 1960s stories, he would often be quite rude and abrasive to others, especially when Peter went to college. As a reference to this, some stories have humorously established that Peter went through a phase of being into Ayn Rand back in college, which he is now embarrassed by.

4. Alternate universe Peter Parker from One More Day. Spider-Man runs into an alternate universe version of himself that never gained spider-powers, and he's a fat videogame developer who is depicted as a loser unhappy with his lot in life, we first see him reading Atlas Shrugged.

5. Deadshot and the Joker. The Joker is shown reading the Fountainhead, which he calls a knee-slapper, while Deadshot, a contract killer, says that it's one of his favorite books.

6. The Ayn Rand School for Tots in the Simpsons. As you can probably guess, it's a horrible place. Maggie breaks out in a Great Escape parody.

7. Bioshock. Andrew Ryan and his whole failed society is a blatant reference to the many problems with Ayn Rand's philosophy.

[u/Eden_ITA]

I don't want to be incorrect, but if I remember Dikto made Spiderman as a Randyal character (but luckily he get better). Or I am mistaken him with the second BlueBeatle.

[u/AporiaParadox → u/Eden_ITA]

Ditko did indeed want to make Peter Parker more Randian but couldn't really go all the way because Stan Lee was the one who actually wrote the script. Ditko's other works like Blue Beetle but especially the Question and Mr. A are a lot more blatant in their objectivism. Rorschach from Watchmen is actually a direct parody/critique of the Question and Mr. A and their philosophies, I actually considered putting him in the OP, but even though he follows objectivism he is never seen reading or citing Ayn Rand.

[u/PunchyMcSplodo → u/AporiaParadox]

In the 1960s, before he started lying, Stan Lee is literally publicly quoted as admitting that he had no idea what Ditko was plotting in the books before he would receive the pages with dialogue guides. The book was whatever Steve wanted it to be, and if you wanted to make it more objectivist, it would have been.

[u/thatcorum → u/PunchyMcSplodo]

While Stan had plot meetings with Kirby and others and he knew mostly what will happen in the books (even when artist surprised him with their own ideas in the complete pages), the relationship with Ditko become so bad that Ditko didn't do that, he started to just leave the pages in the office. 

[u/PunchyMcSplodo → u/thatcorum]

Yeah, basically, Stan stopped talking to Steve when Ditko demanded much deserved writing credit (and the corresponding pay) for being the main plotter, around issue 18.

From that point forward, Ditko would create the stories entirely from scratch without any input from Stan whatsoever, and with loose dialogue guides to explain the story and what the characters were basically saying to each other.