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    Fan Works 
  • My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic:
    • Rhymey, whose constant rhyming shtick has led many readers to declare him the most annoying character in the series, not helped by him getting disproportionately large amounts of dialogue that don't contribute anything to the plot. He even gets chewed out for talking this way by Unintentionally Sympathetic ex-Wonderbolt Ace Ray. Unusually, Rhymey's sour reception only led to the character receiving more creator favoritism, leading to the author ramping up his screentime to piss people off.
    • The sequel adds Goldwin, an Expy of Jeff from Today's Special. Several episodes in My Brave Pony: Star Fleet Magic II (which plagiarize entire episodes of Today's Special) are made specifically to involve Goldwin, even when they add nothing to the overall plot whatsoever.
    • Ironically, while the author is willing to shout at everyone who makes fun of his characters, he doesn't care for the majority of them at all, ignoring them completely if he thinks that they serve no purpose for him anymore outside of battle scenes.
  • Prehistoric Earth: With Luczynski's admittance to her and Drew being amongst his favorite characters, plus Nathanoraptor's own thoughts about her, Cynthia initially came across as this. The fact that Luczynski reportedly tried immensely hard to push her into being a secondary main character alongside Drew at the potential expense of Jack and Leon certainly didn't help her case. However, thanks to several subsequent developments she's undergone, her and Drew becoming an official couple, not to mention the heavily hinted possibility that she might be a mole working for the villains, and later confirmation as a mole...working for the heroes, she has successfully shaken off this initial impression. And even that wasn't enough to save her from still ranking fairly low in popularity amongst the readers or initially spending a couple years facing the possibility of getting Adapted Out of the subsequent reboot Prehistoric Park Reimagined.
  • React Watch Believe Yikes introduced a character named Noire, who is the subconscious manifestation of Blake's perverted side. At first, she just makes lewd jokes and breaks the fourth wall during season 3, but becomes much more prominent to the point of replacing Blake entirely for season 5. The creator also got upset at people who didn't like her and had the characters in the story sympathize with her over a fake backstory. From season 7 onward she is her own separate entity. The only reason fans didn't outright hate her is that she continually got comeuppance for her actions and the other characters stopped liking her after they learned the truth.

    Sports 
  • One year, FOX's coverage of NASCAR races added a "Digger Cam"—a ground-level camera in the infield that showed cars coming around a turn. The "digger" part comes from an animated gopher named Digger, who would pop up out of a hole, look behind him, notice the cars, scream, and then frantically get back into his hole. It was kind of funny the first time... before they decided to do it repeatedly, every single race. This was the signal for FOX to render Digger in CGI, give him his own prerace cartoon, and offer Digger merchandise. The response escalated to three words: kill the rodent. Digger was so beloved by FOX, they gave him a speaking cameo in the film Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which was hated in its own right. It doesn't help that NASCAR actually ordered Fox to stop using Digger, blaming him for a decline in attendance of NASCAR races.
  • Sports Center had the Mark Sanchez "Butt Fumble", which the network refused to let be beaten in its "Worst of the Worst" competition. The hosts got sick of it, but the competition it went against was usually something it could easily beat when there were funnier fails in the lowlight reel. It was eventually retired after 40 undefeated weeks.
  • The Big 12 conference and the Universities of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The favoritism of those three schools (the former two for having lots of money and strong football programs, the last for their basketball program and the former Big 8 headquarters being in Kansas City) has more or less (combined with front office instability) led to the near-collapse of the conference and four schools leaving; the conference barely survived by bringing in two new schools, one of them West Virginia—more than 700 miles from its nearest conference opponent (Iowa State). The conference defending Kansas' Jerkass attitude over the University of Missouri leaving (who had good reasons, such as the athletic department losing money due to the loss of football rivals Nebraska and Colorado) and the formation of The Longhorn Network (which is considered nothing more than a recruitment tool for Texas) only makes things worse. It should be noted that most of the other big conferences had the same Pet attitude toward Texas and Oklahoma, as evidenced by the Pac-10's attempted recruitment of both schools AND their willingness to take any other schools they wanted to bring with them (Texas Tech and Oklahoma State). Not so with Kansas, as, had the Big 12 broken up, they would have been one of the remaining Big 12 schools with no conference despite the aforementioned highly successful basketball program, which could possibly justify their aforementioned attitude (Missouri's departure meant the end of Kansas' longest standing rivalry in basketball). In fact, the game of college football could be looked at as the Pet of the NCAA and universities as a whole, given how it alone has driven the massive conference realignments in the past few years and how all the other sports programs must bend over backwards to accomodate them (college football's huge popularity with US sports fans is the only thing keeping it from being a true Pet).
  • The New York Cosmos. While some pro sports leagues get accused of giving certain teams preferential treatment, the North American Soccer League was upfront in saying they wanted the Cosmos to be the league's best team, since they felt the fate of the entire league depended on having a successful New York franchise. So the league didn't object to the Cosmos pursuing the world's top talent, famously luring the sport's biggest star, Pelé, to New York for three years. Instead, the Cosmos' Invincible Hero status ended up alienating fans of the other teams

    Theatre 
  • Seamus in A Very Potter Musical. At least to his actor Matt Lang, who made sure that Seamus would be featured in the sequels after he got cut from the first one. Despite being of no relevance to the plot, he still gets as much screen time and lines(if not, more) as the other students like Cho, Neville and Luna who have much more important roles to play. In fact, three long monologues that were written for Seamus were cut for time constraints. Whilst he’s not hated by fans, his inclusion definitely felt forced and limited the screen time of more beloved characters like Neville and Luna.
  • Arachne in the first version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was Julie Taymor's original creation and responsible for creating Spider-Man and giving him his costume, got no less than three songs of her own (including one devoted to shoe shopping), supplanted the Green Goblin as the main villain of the show in Act Two, was designed in-universe to be unbeatable as she was an immortal illusion master, competed with Mary Jane as Peter's love interest, and technically won in the end by regaining her humanity and being able to die like she wanted. Julie Taymor insisted that not making Arachne's redemption arc the main focus of Act Two would ruin the artistic merit of the play and compared cutting any of her songs or scenes to a mastectomy, while general audiences were much less receptive to her and how her story took focus away from Spider-Man, was too dark for a family-oriented show, and undermined the highlights of Act 1. After Taymor was fired, much of Arachne's role was cut out via an extensive Retool, reducing her to The Artifact.

    Theme Parks 

    Toys 
  • Same-character redecoes. It's common, in any action-figure line, for the later waves to feature an already-released character (usually the protagonist) with a different paintjob and sometimes a different accessory. This is generally meant as a cost-saving measure, since it's much cheaper than remolding an entirely new figure. Collectors and fans hate these things from the start: they're rereleases of something they already own, most of them are inaccurate in appearance to the actual character, and they tend to look... well, stupid. This would be fine - just ignore them and move on - except stores tend to not be aware of this. Most of the time, stores decide the figures that'll get put on shelves, and have a lot of power in determining case assortments. Stores place much more stock in the most recognizable names, so they tend to request lots of same-character redecoes, which leads to more minor characters getting shortpacked or going completely unreleased. As an example, one Spider-Man line features, in one case, three Superposeable Spider-Mans, three Hydro Blast Spider-Mans, three Dual Web Swinging Spider-Man, and one Sandman. This has the paradoxical effect of turning characters who are normally popular in fiction into Creator's Pets on the toy shelves, with many fans bemoaning their local store containing nothing but a solid wall of Spider-Man in tacky outfits. In the case of one series, the Creator's Pet status of the main characters in this regard is often blamed for the line's cancellation - it turned out kids didn't want to buy three Claw Grabber Skeletors any more than the collectors did.
  • BIONICLE has Vezon, to one half of the fanbase. Greg Farshtey admitted that Vezon was one of his favorite characters to write, and in the web serials, it shows. Despite actually having very little to offer in terms of advancing the plot, Vezon is usually there to offer his Plucky Comic Relief antics, especially after he fused with the Kanohi Olmak and gained dimension-hopping abilities.
  • Bratz has Cloe and Yasmin, two dolls that were in nearly every single line, with most other dolls being slight variations of them. They're even considered one of the main reasons the franchise is dead.
  • The legendarily-bad Transformers: Armada Side Swipe mold. When it arrived in stores, it was reviled as a fusion of every negative stereotype about the Unicron Trilogy: boring vehicle mode and a badly proportioned, overly gimmicky, and poorly articulated robot mode, with even the Minicon getting some hate. Hasbro listened to fans and never used the mold again... is what would be written here, if the mold wasn't reused twice in the Universe line, and given a heavy-but-unhelpful remold into Runabout. The last of these earned particular ire for an Ensemble Dark Horse receiving the mold (and for having the wrong name, and for his partner not getting a similar release). It took three years for the mold to disappear from shelves... until Botcon 2012 offered a new version of him at premium price. Fortunately, Shattered Glass Treadshot finally broke the curse: he's the well-loved Reveal the Shield Jazz mold with the color scheme and head of Side Swipe.


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