Examples of Condemned by History in Web Original media.
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Real Life Examples — Creators
- Steve Cutts' earlier animations were acclaimed in the internet thanks to his unique animation styles and short films exploring human nature and society, such as MAN and Happiness, which resulted in Moby hiring Cutts to make a music video for "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" song from the album These Systems Are Failing, winning a couple of awards in the process. As his audience grew up, however, they became more critical of them for several reasons: Most of his videos showcase the flaws of humanity, but never ever show any sort of redeeming factor for them, going all in for the Humans Are Bastards trope, resulting in the supposed examinations of human nature actually being full-blown criticisms about humanity and that nothing can be done about it. Second, some of the "bad things" that humanity has done are actually benefits: For example, a core message in "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" is that mobile phones are causing people to rely on Social Media Before Reason — yet these same phones are allowing these same people to capture and depict scenes, that traditional media outlets normally wouldn't show, such as police brutality (something that the music video acknowledges but frames as a bad thing). The final nail in the coffin is that his animation style for MAN, Happiness and "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" have not aged well at all, being clearly made using rigged 2D models, with the latter's rubber hose style being seen as a shallow representation. Nowadays, opinions of them are that they were primary made as misery porn and are not as deep or thought-provoking as people thought they were. Exceptions have been made however for Cutts' newer animations such as A Brief Disagreement, and that's only because of the higher quality of the animation and the fact they tend to focus more on Black Comedy rather than sending a message.
Real Life Examples — Trends and Works
- The "angry reviewer" style was a popular style of reviewing in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was popularized around 2006-2007 by The Angry Video Game Nerd and The Nostalgia Critic, who made a name for themselves by deliberately reviewing bad video games and movies with comedically exaggerated anger. They often interspersed their reviews with skits, foul language, and Vulgar Humor, alongside giving background information about what they reviewed. The genre spread outside of reviewing video games and movies, with many critics reviewing comics or animated works.
However, in the mid-2010s, the genre saw a massive decline in popularity. Once AVGN and The Nostalgia Critic blew up, Sturgeon's Law kicked in: a large number of channels tried to copy their style by simply ramping up the vitriol and vulgarity, while ignoring the wit and research of the original channels. Several of these videos also contained personal attacks against the creators and fans of the works being reviewed, which were not always done humorously. Not helping matters was the fact that many of these imitators either missed or ignored the joke that the Nerd and the Critic were severely overreacting. The genre was also hit by a combination of Misaimed Fandom and Reviews Are the Gospel, resulting in fans taking them at face value and treating them as the absolute truth, prompting backlash from creators and those less invested. By the late 2010s, viewers began to see such reviews as too mean-spirited and often done in bad faith, gravitating towards either reviews with less overtly negative comedy or straightforward video essays with more professionalism. In addition, YouTube's demonetization policies forced them to cut down on the Cluster F-Bombs common to this style, and updated community guidelines which have, at worst, removed the more extreme videos attacking creators and fans of the works being reviewed for violating their harassment and cyberbullying policies, making the kind of anger they displayed less rewarding financially.
Nowadays, the only truly successful shows that survive with this style are the aforementioned AVGNnote , Angry Joenote , JonTronnote , and on the French scene, Joueur du Greniernote . Even Doug Walker himself, despite being the main inspiration and source of criticism for the genre, significantly toned down the anger in his Nostalgia Critic persona when the show was Un-Cancelled and incorporated comedy skits and media analysis, as well as discussing more well-received works that he has a more favorable opinion of. Most of the critics known for the genre have either retired from reviewing, suffered from declining viewership for sticking with the old formula, or have transitioned into a more professional — or at the very least, less overly angry — style; with some, like Quinton Reviews and Lindsay Ellis, going so far as to publicly disavow their older videos they made when the trend was in full swing. - Creepypastas, campfire-style horror stories originating on internet forums and Image Boards, emerged online at the end of the 2000s. Once extremely popular during the early 2010s, with communities dedicated to certain stories or genres, creepypastas quickly lost popularity by the middle of the decade as their mostly teenage audience grew out of them, tastes shifted towards less "edgy" material (primarily among younger audiences) and later creepypastas became increasingly derivative and cliched, causing a dramatic decline in "scare factor". While online horror as a whole has survived to the present, and the creepypasta genre still has a small following, a number of prominent works within it have long since been consigned to the junkyard of pop-culture history:
- Jeff the Killer was one of the most popular creepypastas ever written, inspiring loads of imitators, spin-offs, and sequels. However, most of the imitators were negatively received for being poorly written Strictly Formula stories of young people being put through ludicrous amounts of trauma, suffering some kind of Body Horror, and turning into supernatural serial killers. This led to a critical reappraisal of the original story, leading to it being ridiculed for its typos, failed attempts at scares or drama and wildly unrealistic characters, with an attempted "rewrite" just making it look even worse. These days, if asked about Jeff the Killer, most Internet denizens will greet it with either a snort of derision or a short lecture about the poor imitators it inspired in its wake. Since the late 2010s and especially the early 2020s, interest in the creepypasta has started again, but solely due to efforts to find the origin of the infamous image associated with it; a common refrain among many is that the image and its mysterious origin are way more interesting than the story itself.
- First created on the Something Awful forums in 2009, Slender Man was an early innovator of the creepypasta. Viral sensations like Marble Hornets, and Slender spread him across the internet like wildfire, with further fan art, cosplay, and web shows cropping up in the early 2010s. This rapid rise would lead to rapid overexposure, quickly causing Slender Man to become seen as a cliche of the genre. Slender Man's fate would ultimately be sealed in May 2014 after two adolescent girls in Wisconsin who believed that Slender Man was real stabbed one of their friends
as an attempted Human Sacrifice to Slender Man. The negative publicity from this and other such incidents — another stabbing in Ohio, an arson in Florida, and an epidemic of suicide attempts on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — caused Slender Man's popularity to rapidly decline, irrevocably tainted by the real-life incidents around him. A 2018 movie based on Slender Man was widely panned as in poor taste due to the incidents, with some theaters outright refusing to show the film. Those who did see the movie would give it overwhelmingly negative reviews, with The Verge's Carli Velocci calling it "a nail in the coffin of a dying fandom". Once a popular boogeyman and a hit with horror fans, Slender Man is no longer taken seriously by a huge chunk of its fanbase, with the overexposure and bad reputation of the character all but assuring its consignment to permanent obscurity. - Sonic.exe used to be a well-respected game Creepypasta that centered around The Most Dangerous Video Game. But after critics tore it apart and made people realize its flaws, including its plot holes, glaring writing flaws and an unsympathetic, idiotic "protagonist", the pasta was lampooned so hard it got moved onto a wiki dedicated to bad Creepypastas, with most of the fanbase outgrowing it. This led JC-The-Hyena, the pasta's author, writing an angry response to the Creepypasta Wiki's deletion of the story so overwrought with Purple Prose that JC only drew further attention to both the story and himself. This ended up resulting in even more mockery and criticism, not helped by the sequel and 2017 remake underperforming due to taking the original story's problems to extremes. As the final nail in the coffin, it was discovered in the summer of 2021 that JC had been doing sexual roleplays with underage users and abusing his former girlfriend into doing the same thing. This led to many in the fandom disowning JC, and his creation fell under new ownership. While there does still exist a significant following for the general idea of Sonic.exe, especially among kids or adults who encountered it as kids through the fan-related projects and video games, it is almost entirely divorced from the actual original story, something all fans consider today to be not at all well-written or scary.
- Squidward's Suicide was one of the very first and most well-known pastas of the "lost episode" subgenre. It started using the typical tropes of this subgenre, like the description of "hyper-realistic" eyes, extra blood and gore, and normally lighthearted cartoons doing unbelievably dark things. All of those aspects were probably very shocking and disturbing at the time, leading to its initial popularity. But it was followed by the massive influx of generally poorly written "lost episode" stories that used the same format or something similar, most of the time retaining the now infamous "hyper-realistic" cliche. It now comes off as more narmful than anything else. SpongeBob SquarePants itself has done just as many shocking things to the eyes of the average fan ("Are You Happy Now?" has some Bait-and-Switch gags implying Squidward was about to commit suicide, while "One Coarse Meal" actually has Plankton attempting suicide by lying down in the middle of the street with the intent of being run over; it doesn't help that both of these episodes were released when the show's Seasonal Rot was in full force), making a suicide seem less shocking. The story doesn't hold up nearly as well as it once did. The Season 12 episode "SpongeBob in RandomLand" would later make a brief reference to it, but it was censored shortly afterwards. The only reason the story is still on the Creepypasta Wiki is due to its initial impact on the genre as a whole, being listed under the "Historical Archive" category among many other first pastas.
- The DEATH BATTLE! episode that pitted Justin Bieber against Rebecca Black, while never the most celebrated episode of the show, was once seen as a hilarious Take That! to two of the most infamously hated singers of The New '10s. However, time would not be kind to the episode for multiple reasons. For starters, Death Battle’s fights have come a long way since Season 1; even episodes where the match or combatants are Played for Laughs have far more dynamic fights and generally treat the participants more respectfully (or at least sympathetically), with Chuck Norris fighting Segata Sanshiro in Season 2 being seen and cited as an example of a joke battle done right, along with such fights as Randy Savage vs Kool Aid Man and SpongeBob vs Super Friends Aquaman. Both Bieber and Black would go on to be more respected adult singers, making the depiction of them as vapid, overhyped teenagers seem not only unnecessarily mean-spirited, but severely outdated. Finally, attacks against child stars have been increasingly frowned upon thanks to widespread reports of them getting exploited by executives and what harassment can do to their psyche (with Rebecca Black being one such victim). This episode has since been seen as contributing to such harassment by listing real-life fears of them as "weaknesses". The episode's ending, where both singers die in a car crash, along with shoehorning in the deaths of The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, is now seen as needlessly cruel, compounded by Wiz and Boomstick celebrating their demise. These factors have caused the episode's reputation to plummet, to the point where even the creators of the show would like to forget about this episode.
- Created by Lucas Cruikshank, Fred was initially one of YouTube's biggest names, once being the second-most subscribed channel overall (and the very first to reach over 1 million subscribers), and receiving over 20 million views per video for its fast-paced comedy and its eponymous protagonist Fred Figglehorn's iconic Helium Speech. Then in 2010, Nickelodeon gave Lucas the opportunity to capitalize on his character's fame through both a sitcom and a trilogy of TV movies. Fred's Bratty Half-Pint characterization and bare plots translated disastrously to TV: the pilot movie received 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 1.9 on IMDb, with its two sequels getting a 2.4 and a 2, respectively, and the show receiving a 1.7. Afterwards, Fred rapidly lost both viewers and subscribers until Lucas ended production due to getting sick of being typecasted as Fred and quietly abandoned the channel in 2015. A 2020 attempt to revive Fred on TikTok languished in obscurity, and Fred is now remembered as a childish relic of early-era YouTube.
- The Game Theory video on the original Five Nights at Freddy's was a major Breakthrough Hit for the channel when it first debuted for its in-depth analysis of the game's ambiguous storyline, becoming the highest viewed video on the channel and establishing FNAF as the most popular series for it to cover. Over time however, as the overarching story of the franchise was better established and the theory was discredited, many fans came to look back on the video with disdain, viewing the subject matter (which linked the game's story to a real massacre that took place at a Chuck E. Cheese in 1993) as incredibly distasteful to the actual victims of the tragedy, and the evidence used to support the conclusions as comically far-fetched to the point of making little logical sense. While MatPat remains a controversial figure online for his often outlandish and highly contested Epileptic Trees, virtually no one looks back on his original video with kindness.
- "Obey the Walrus" was once a legendary video in the world of YouTube Horror, with many citing its unknown origins and its use of Sensory Abuse as a highly effective and unconventional method of scaring. When people learned of the person in the video, transgender actress and model Sandie "The Goddess Bunny" Crisp, it served as a major case of Colbert Bump for her career and led to her gaining newfound popularity. However, after Sandie's death in 2021, people began to view "Obey the Walrus" through a more critical lens, noting how it seemed to use Sandie's physical deformities (the result of malpractice for the treatment of her polio) as a means of unnerving viewers, which many came to view as incredibly disrespectful towards the late actress. Coupled with many uncomfortable truths coming out about the video's creator in late 2023, "Obey the Walrus" has gone from one of the internet's most beloved horror videos to being viewed as a little more than a glorified freak show that exploited the physical appearance of an aspiring entertainer for the sake of views.
- Released at the height of Channel Awesome's fame in 2012, To Boldly Flee was initially seen as funny, emotional, and overall genuinely impressive for a scrappy team of Internet personalities. Even among those who disliked Doug Walker's decision to kill off The Nostalgia Critic to focus on his passion project Demo Reel, it was generally considered a good swan song for the character. However, changing tastes in Internet media, increasing disdain from many of the special's own contributors, and the Critic's hasty revival after Demo Reel failed would prompt reappraisals for the worse. The humor was seen as clumsy and immature at best and flat-out offensive at worst with surface-level, if not inaccurate parodies and frequent shout outs as crutches, the drama felt hollow and cheapened by the Critic's revival, the plot was considered unfocused and meandering, the commentary on the then-recent SOPA/PIPA bills was deemed preachy and badly dated, and the Critic's death was seen as a big mistake. After the Not So Awesome document revealed (among other things) the ugly circumstances of its deeply Troubled Production in 2018 (and caused the site and its community to collapse in disgrace as a result), To Boldly Flee became universally seen as a troubled, overly long, self-indulgent point of no return for the site, which nobody looks back on fondly.
- While YouTube Poop as a whole remains popular, numerous techniques commonly used in it have fallen out of grace.
- Jokes that lean heavily into the edgy, such as racial jokes and Black Comedy Rape, have increasingly come to be seen as tasteless as the mainstream Internet moved its preferences farther away from "edgy" content with the rise of the alt-right using "edgy jokes" as a recruitment method for fascist views. Some creators who once employed it, such as Combuskenisawesome, have publicly disowned the videos in question.
- Audio Sensory Abuse, colloquially known as "ear rape", has come to be strongly associated with Sturgeon's Law, as many, many videos that utilize it use it as a substitute for jokes, sometimes to the point of having the video being nothing but it.
- Word-mirroring, also known as "sus jokes" (or "coc jokes", or "weew jokes") is simply taking half of a word and reversing it immediately afterward. This grew to be widely mocked the more it was used due to being one of the easiest possible edits to make. Even the creator who popularized it in the first place, DaThings, now mainly uses it in ironic Self-Deprecation.
In-Universe Examples
- Nathan Rabin had done the series "Forgotbusters" to analyze films that were among the top-grossing hits of the years in which they came out but have gone on to be almost completely forgotten since. While not all of them ended up reviled like most examples in this page (e.g. Space Jam and Jingle All the Way still have a following, Avatar fell pretty hard but seems to be bouncing back), there are still those where not standing the test of time coincides with being reassessed as worthless, like Shark Tale.
- YouTuber Quinton Reviews has a series called Fallen Titans which discusses Internet phenomena that were once massively popular, but have since faced significant backlash and/or fallen into obscurity. Specific examples covered include Ray William Johnson, The Nostalgia Critic and its Channel Awesome debacle, The Abridged Series, Fred, and himself.
- Todd in the Shadows:
- When he puts "Afternoon Delight" atop his Worst of 1976 ranking, he states it was a very popular song at the time, but nowadays nearly everyone agrees that it was absolutely terrible.
- The One Hit Wonderland episode on Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" talks about how the song went from being the biggest song of the 1970s and winning an Oscar for Best Original Song, to being seen as one of the worst songs of all time.
- Another One Hit Wonderland video on Rick Dees' "Disco Duck" points out how, despite the song being huge enough in its time to have a massive wealth of performance footage available, it's now one of the few major disco songs still near-universally considered a punchline at most.
- In the Trainwreckords episode about the hip-hop group Arrested Development and their album Zingalamaduni, Todd examines why the band went from winning Grammys to being considered embarrassingly outdated in just two years. Reasons include changing politics, behind-the-scenes arguments, and an increasing perception of the band as pretentious and looking down on other rappers whose music was considerably edgier, not helped by many of their own lyrics or remarks in interviews.
