A boxer steps into the ring and declares that today the crowd will watch as he pulverizes the reigning world champion. He then produces a straw dummy that looks a little like his supposed opponent, beats the hell out of it, and declares himself the victor. This is the strawman fallacy; a debater constructs a weakened or just plain unrecognizable form of an opponent's argument, and in defeating it acts like he has defeated the real argument. A straw character is a caricature of a person holding an opposing viewpoint, a character the author has set up in order to ridicule a particular viewpoint.