Memetic Loser

Got so bad they had to start keeping count. Still better than Yamcha and Raditz, though. Plus, at least the former two got bones thrown their way.

Vegeta: Congratulations, you've just destroyed the equivalent of 3 Raditz.
Krillin: That's right. What now, you son of a bi—
Vegeta: Nappa here is worth 5 Raditz.
Krillin: ...what?
Vegeta: And I am worth 15 Raditz.
Krillin: [disappointed] I...oh.
Nappa: Aw, come on! Don't get so down on yourself! At least you've proven that your Raditz is still stronger than our Raditz.
Raditz: [in the afterlife] I...hate...all of you!

— Dragon Ball Z Abridged, episode 8

Sometimes a character is shown to be competent, maybe even heroic and badass. But that's not what they're remembered most for. Instead, they become remembered for their supposed "lameness". The fandom flanderizes that one time the character made a stupid mistake or got defeated in a shameful way, to the point that as far as the fandom is concerned they're a complete weakling who cannot defeat an insect.

Maybe a parody version of the character is more well-known than the character themselves to begin with. Maybe the character is weak or unskilled at the beginning of a series, but gains more skills and goes through Character Development later after the character's initial portrayal had already burned its way into most peoples' minds. Or they have moments of triumph and failure, but the failures are remembered better because they are more plot-relevant or otherwise stand out more. However it happened the character's "lameness" undergoes Memetic Mutation and they reach Butt-Monkey status within Fanon. Expect no one to care because it's funny.

In video games, particularly games with fan-tiered characters, this can happen to characters that are perceived as low-tier characters. Going into a multiplayer game with one of these can easily lead to mockery or even getting booted just for picking a character seen as weak, even if you're skilled enough to make excellent use of the character's abilities. Maybe the character is Difficult, but Awesome, but people only focus on the "Difficult" elements because the majority of people who use that character don't quite get a good grip on their potential. Or maybe the character is good and doesn't need hundreds of hours to be good at, but people still think the character is garbage for whatever reason.

Occasionally, the character may also be depicted as The Woobie because people also feel sorry for the character, and may end up as the Fan of Underdog. A Memetic Loser can actually become very popular as a loser if their Fanon characterization is amusing or sympathetic enough.

Contrast Memetic Badass (which, despite being the exact opposite of this trope, can often be applied to the very same characters as an ironic joke, just as a Memetic Badass can themselves be flipped to become a Memetic Loser), Watch It for the Meme (for when it's something bad enough to draw people in). Compare What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? (which is a possible cause of this trope being in effect), Not Badass Enough for Fans, Butt-Monkey, The Scrappy, Low-Tier Letdown, and Never Live It Down. Super-Trope of Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
  • Dragon Ball
  • My Hero Academia
  • Pokémon
• Video Games
  • Dragalia Lost
  • Fate/Grand Order
  • Fire Emblem Heroes
  • Genshin Impact
  • Pokémon
• Web Original

Advertising

• The "spokespuppet" mascot of the defunct online petshop Pets.com. Due to the store being the most high-profile victim of the dot-com bubble, their mascot is often used as the poster-child for the crash.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: It's not uncommon for people to take out-of-context caps and portray Archie as a stereotypical "nice guy" who expects kisses and dates in exchange for being sweet. Some comic issues have portrayed him that way, but it's not his normal characterization.
• The DCU
  • Aquaman often gets hit with this, mostly due to his memetic Super Friends incarnation. We even named a trope for the inane hoops one has to jump through to make Aquaman's hyper-specific skill set seem useful in a team setting. Though he started to shed this due to the public being introduced to his more badass interpretation, such as his appearances in Injustice: Gods Among Us and the DC Extended Universe.
    • The Super Friends Aquaman appears in DEATH BATTLE! and earns the distinction of being the only character whose loss is stated as obvious even before the fight starts. It is made clear, though, that it's only this incarnation of the character that's a loser.
    • Black Manta gets this status as well, since his only ambition in life is to be Aquaman's archenemy when he could have picked any other superhero.
  • Batman
    • While probably not as bad as Aquaman, Robin was famously considered lame for quite a while after the 60's Batman live-action series, mainly for the catchphrases, silly costume (complete with shorts), and Burt Ward not being very imposing or intimidating. It doesn't help matters that Batman & Robin is often considered one of the worst superhero movies ever made, or that Christian Bale publicly stated that he'd refuse to film anymore Batman movies if Robin were ever added to the franchise. This has started changing in recent years thanks to significantly more impressive portrayals in stuff like Teen Titans and the Batman: Arkham Series, but it's still not uncommon to find people who joke about Robin (or any sidekick) being lame.
    • Fanon portrayals of The Riddler seem to be stuck in the Silver Age. Batman has many incompetent foes, but Riddler is the one who is always brought up for it, even though he's actually right up there with Joker in terms of danger factor, and has been treated as equal or nearly equal to the Joker in many comics. For some, it simply boils down to his self-defeating Weaksauce Weakness, as it makes it difficult to believe he could ever succeed in anything when he deliberately and unavoidably sabotages himself.
    • Poor Killer Moth. He's been kicked around Gotham so many times that it's near impossible to remember that he was actually a pretty big threat to Batman when first introduced. He's a Memetic Loser in-universe, with his reputation going further and further downhill ever since he got effortlessly beaten up by Batgirl on her first night out. Writers tried to beef him up by having him become the genuinely scary Charaxes by making a deal with Neron, but ultimately Charaxes got retconned away and he went back to being the Butt-Monkey of Batman's Rogues Gallery. The Batman took this to its logical conclusion in terms of sheer lameness; he's not even a true independent supervillain, he's the Penguin's coffee boy.
  • Though canonically one of the strongest Green Lanterns, Hal Jordan is treated as this in some circles, mostly for the anomalous number of 50s and 60s comics where a guy who's battled entire alien warfleets gets hit on the head and knocked out by a random thug. Given his frequent cases of Idiot Balls, those same circles tend to assume he's developed brain damage.
  • While not as maligned as Aquaman or (Gi)Ant-Man, you'll find very few people outside of the fanbase willing to stick up for any version of Hawkman. If anything, it can be somewhat harder to find people willing to stick up for him, because while the others have Heart Is an Awesome Power on their side, Hawkman is physically a Badass Normal and his "main" power of flight (and only when using a wing pack) is too straightforward and commonplace to really eke any special uses out of. These three share the same general problem: most people only know of them through team books, which more often than not have lineups based on Popularity Power^note As well as its inverse; for most of its history, in fact, Justice League of America was thought of as a rest-home for heroes that couldn't hold a steady solo book. instead of any real synergy. As a result, you'd often have at least two characters with overlapping powers/fighting styles, and whichever one had the better powers and the bigger fanbase would often reduce the other guy to a Poor Man's Substitute^note This was an especially big problem in the Silver Age, where your average comic-book writer could maybe write two-and-a-half distinct personalities. As the Western Animation section below notes: why give Hawkman any respect when Superman has all your Flying Brick needs and then some?
  • When Sideways introduced Tempus Fuginaut, an expy of Marvel's Uatu The Watcher and a multiversal guardian, he quickly became this. While he would later be stated to be to protect the DC Universe from the Dark Multiverse first seen in Dark Nights: Metal, the fandom had a massive field day with this extreme case of Remember the New Guy?, as he'd logically been involved in events like the various Earth-One/Earth-Two pre-Crisis stories, Crisis on Infinite Earths itself, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, JLA: Earth-2, Infinite Crisis, 52, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, Forever Evil (2013), Convergence, The Multiversity, and the aforementioned Dark Nights Metal and yet was nowhere to be seen, leading to cracks about how bad he is at the job — a sentiment shared in-universe by Duke Thomas in the Tales from the Dark Multiverse story about Metal as, after having transformed into the Last Knight, he called out and attacked Fuginaut for his refusal to help the universes in the Dark Multiverse.
  • Captain Atom is, on paper, one of the strongest active heroes in the DC Universe, being the original inspiration for Doctor Manhattan and having absorbed a lot of elements in return, at his strongest being a nigh-omnipotent Energy Being with full mastery of atomic power encased in a shell of unbreakable metal. Unfortunately, in the alternate-universe story Kingdom Come, his main impact on the story was dying when he got split open by Parasite, in a play on "splitting an atom", and with similarly destructive results. After that point, he became a major-league victim of The Worf Effect, especially whenever featuring in an Expendable Alternate Universe, with him getting his suit ruptured and exploding in virtually every such story he appears in, and in many such cases, only appearing in those stories so that someone can break him open and blow him up. When combined with lengthy periods of him being Out of Focus in the "main" universe, it's become a joke that his only real power is exploding.
• Marvel Universe
  • Hank Pym will forever be known as the lame guy that hit his wife that one time and has the not-so-useful power to controls ants and reduce his size, regardless of his portrayals in later comics or the fact that, when his powers are well portrayed, he's nothing short of terrifying. He started to grow out of it a bit, however, thanks to his appearances in Dark Reign, his portrayal as a Badass Pacifist in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (among other things, he went toe to toe with Frost Giants, guys who usually give Thor trouble, and impressing Sif and the Valkyries in the process), and more recently his well-received appearance as a grumpy yet badass old man and former superhero who mentors Scott Lang in the Ant-Man film.
  • Bucky Barnes used to vie with Robin for the position of the proverbial lame sidekick. Then Ed Brubaker brought him back as the titular character in Captain America: Winter Soldier and revealed he was essentially a Child Soldier and brought him back as a Brainwashed and Crazy assassin. Because of Adaptation Displacement, his original portrayal tends to be mostly overlooked by this point.
  • Hawkeye. In canon, Hawkeye is the Badass Normal of the Avengers, trained by Captain America in close-quarters combat, an expert swordsman good enough to be able to pass for a ninja, and is literally the world's greatest marksman. In spite of this, thanks to his goofy sense of humour, his colourful costume, being Book Dumb, and a less-than-impressive depiction in The Avengers (which was his first real introduction to mainstream audiences), he's often regarded as a joke, dismissed as the weakest Avenger, if not weakest Superhero in general, and given serious disrespect. His portrayal in Avengers: Age of Ultron made things better for some, but he still struggles to get respect outside of his fanbase.
    • Making matters worse, the critically acclaimed Matt Fraction/David Aja run on his ongoing acted as a deconstruction of Badass Normal characters and explored a realistic take on Hawkeye's character; though he's still depicted as a competent fighter, it demonstrated how being a One-Man Army won't last long if they have enough mooks. However, fans and critics exaggerated it to the point Hawkeye appears completely incompetent, leading to accusations of Badass Decay. The following run by Jeff Lemire then made things worse by taking this interpretation and making it canon, with Clint now completely incompetent.
    • His poor reputation is even referenced in the movies themselves. In Age of Ultron, Black Widow jokes about how he actually keeps the team together because the other Avengers all have to work hard to pretend he's useful. In Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man calls him "Arrow Guy" because he doesn't know his name, and then later, this exchange occurs:
    Hawkeye: We haven't met yet. I'm Clint.
    Black Panther: I don't care.
    • Jeremy Renner, the actor who plays Hawkeye, even did a humorous skit on Saturday Night Live where Hawkeye's uselessness next to the other Avengers was Played for Laughs. Later, he did a parody musical performance on The Tonight Show about how even though Hawkeye's powers aren't that impressive, he still has other good qualities.
    • Humorously enough, MCU!Hawkeye's reputation actually swung in the opposite direction come Infinity War and Endgame. While he was the butt of jokes due to his exclusion from Infinity War and its advertising, fans began to change their tunes in the wake of the film's shocking ending, and when Clint returned—in his Ronin persona—for Endgame and ended up playing a role in the heroes' victory, the idea that the Avengers lost their only battle without him but were 3-for-3 with Clint was born. The fauxhawk he sports as Ronin is still a point of ridicule, however,
    • Hawkeye gets this treatment despite being made an honorary Justice League member in JLA/Avengers, making him the only character in comic book history to be a member of both the Justice League and The Avengers.
  • M.O.D.O.K. would be a fearsome villain — his name is an acronym for "Mental Organism Designed Only For Killing", and he more than lives up to it with his love of murder, torture and horrific human experimentation, with his sadism the only thing that matches his Super-Intelligence... except that his design consists of a gigantic and hideously ugly head with tiny little limbs sticking out of it. Because of how stupid this appearance is to modern readers, he's become an absolute joke, with even the creators of post-90s non-comics depictions tending to play up his goofiness. The comics have begun to acknowledge that, but sometimes like to unsettle readers by reminding them that, yes, he looks silly, but he's a deadly serious monster. Just ask The Unbelievable Gwenpool, who got a firsthand demonstration that looking ridiculous doesn't make M.O.D.O.K any less a sadistic and ruthless killer.
  • Spider-Man: Hydro-Man is infamous for constantly sabotaging his own victories. It's expounded by the fact that his power/gimmick (hydrokinesis) is insanely useful, so the only excuse he really has for constantly losing is incompetence. To give you an idea of how bad it is, the RiffTrax crew uses his name as a by-word for stupid and self-defeating villains.
  • X-Men:
    • Cyclops gets this in some form; while certainly a badass, and a strategist on par with Captain America, he still stands next to Wolverine. He has a rather justified reason to be moody or angsty, and his dislike for Wolverine spending time with his wife is understandable given that Wolverine is constantly hitting on her, but some fans flanderize this as him being a real whiner baby; Twisted Toyfair Theatre being notable examples. He is also considered this by his actual fans, who seem to enjoy mocking his Accidental Innuendos, lack of social skills and general dorkiness, but (for at least a few of them) these are qualities that they view as adorable; still it's not uncommon for fans to say they like him because he's a badass but bad at being one.
    • Apocalypse has been considered this in some circles due to how many times he gets beaten by weaker mutants such as Magneto, being manipulated by the Celestials and his reliance on their tech, and his relative unimportance in the grand scheme of things compared to other villains like Thanos or Ultron. In the House of M continuity, he even cowers before Black Bolt and gets vaporized by a whisper from him. Thanos, in comparison, takes a full-on scream from Black Bolt and only gets his armor destroyed and a couple gashes. It doesn't help that he's easy to beat in X-Men vs. Street Fighter and its sequel.

Films — Animation

• The title character of Bambi is frequently the poster child for Sweetness Aversion, and often exemplified whenever mocking Disney's cutesy, cloying image. This is despite the fact that only half the film has Bambi as a naive Momma's Boy fawn getting into cutesy antics (and losing his mother), with the latter half taking on a much darker tone and focusing on Bambi growing into a formidable stag. Counting the much later midquel, even the fawn-era Bambi had his badass moments.
• Dick Grayson/Nightwing of the DC Animated Movie Universe has this reputation. He's a skilled fighter in his own right and was trained by Batman himself. However, his tendency to lose several fights, whether it's at the hands of Damian Wayne, Talon, a brainwashed Batman, Deathstroke, or Scarecrow, led both to complaints that he does not get the respect he deserves and to jokes that Dick's destiny is to be the whipping boy of the DC animated movies. It also doesn't help his case when in the Grand Finale he is killed by Darkseid's forces and then revived by the Lazarus Pit, only to be driven mad from its effects.
• Frozen: While Elsa is depressed and anxious in canon, Modern AUs tend to exaggerate her into being a socially inept NEET. Part of this is due to fans having difficulties transferring her character into a modern, non-magical world. They end up making her a shut-in because she suffers from depression and social anxiety, instead of having her depression come from hating her powers (though Word of God is that she does have an anxiety disorder). Another reason for this is because of the popularity of the fanfic /r9k/Elsa Is Suffering.
• Roshan, better known as the "Ice Age Baby", has become jokingly loathed by memers since early 2020 as they often portray him getting brutally tortured or killed due to him falling into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.

Films — Live-Action

• Battlefield Earth: Terl gets this treatment quite a bit due to a combination of his unwarranted self-importance, him getting easily tricked multiple times, and John Travolta's overacting making him look downright ridiculous. His name has become something of a byword for incompetent, underwhelming movie villains.
• Blade Runner: Rick Deckard is said to be the best of the best when it comes to hunting down replicants. He's actually called out of retirement to handle the four (or five or six) replicants in this movie. However, Deckard is mostly a punching bag for the replicants, and in one case it is Rachael who saves Deckard's life by shooting Leon. Deckard also shoots Zhora in the back while she is running away, and shoots Priss while she's attempting a useless somersault attack. And of course Deckard fails to kill his final target, Roy Batty, who in turn ends up showing him mercy and saving his life. All in all, Deckard doesn't look like an ace when he does his job.
• Cool Cat Saves the Kids: Cool Cat is probably supposed to be a kid, but the fact that he's played by an adult actor ends up making him look like a complete wimp/idiot who can't even defend himself from a six-year old.
• Dragon Ball Evolution: Goku is an angsty teen who whines about not being "cool" enough at his school. Fan Nicknames range from "Geeko" (his In-Series Nickname) to "Noku".
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Suicide Squad: Jared Leto's Joker, for a variety of reasons ranging from his actor's creepy on-set behavior (send co-stars used condoms and dead animals and becoming an extreme annoyance to Will Smith) to a character design that some have mocked as ridiculous, to Leto's pretentious hyping up of the character, to his extremely limited screentime to his laugh being unsatisfactory. The character has been subject to wide derision in contrast to the character's iconic and much-beloved portrayals in The Dark Knight, Batman (1989), Batman: The Animated Series and even Jerome Valeska in Gotham. Some people have even said that the Cesar Romero version was more intimidating. He has spawned a series of memes across the Internet dedicated to mocking him as well as more specific sub-memes on 4chan, with the most popular being "times you acted like the Joker" threads. The unanimous critical acclaim that Joaquin Phoenix received for yet another portrayal of the exact same character in the self-titled movie did nothing to diminish the Leto version's reputation as the weak link in the character's on-screen history. While Leto's Joker appearance in Zack Snyder's Justice League was better received, his new design still received mockery and did little to make people forget about his initial portrayal.
  • Lex Luthor doesn’t fare much better in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice for being a just-as-cringeworthy Expy of the Joker who, as a result of trying so hard to emulate the style of the Joker or the Riddler, completely loses out on the intimidating presence and charismatic sway that Lex Luthor typically has in other movies and media. The movie does intentionally try to make this a different type of portrayal for Luthor, but he is also still meant to be intimidating in a similar way to the Joker. Unfortunately, this is considered to have mostly fallen flat, and he ends up just looking like a cringy teen emulating The Dark Knight’s version of the Joker (not helped by there being many people like this in real life), rather than as an intimidating villain himself.
  • In a similar vein is the theatrical version of Steppenwolf from Justice League. With his official design being radically different from the diabolical figure that was teased in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, coupled with his characterization lacking the dimension that previous antagonists had, even the most loyal DCEU fan has been making jokes at his expense. The mockery skyrocketed once Zack Snyder announced that his recut would use Steppenwolf's previous design, with fans comparing Steppenwolf's designs in the least flattering ways possible. Post-release, the new Steppenwolf is indeed considered a huge improvement, what with a more unique and striking design, much clearer motivations, him being a No-Nonsense Nemesis and, surprisingly, Puppy-Dog Eyes.
  • Similar to Steppenwolf, Ares from Wonder Woman (2017) is, In-Universe, a huge threat due to being an outright god. However, most fans simply cannot let go of his goofy-looking mustache that can be seen even through his war helmet and his portrayal as a quintessential British gentleman, which combined with his lack of screen time (as himself, not pretending to be Sir Patrick) making his actual character mostly forgettable to fans, leaves him mostly remembered as a silly mustache man who didn’t really have much of a presence in the movie rather than as the threat he was meant to be.
• Downfall (2004): Felix Steiner, the unseen general that drove Adolf Hitler into his iconic Villainous Breakdown for failing to carry out an attack on the Soviets, is often jokingly mentioned in the comment sections of World War II videos as the guy who could turn the tide of the war in Hitler's favor, with replies below replicating the infamous Hitler rant scene word per word. Steiner is not the last hope for Hitler in the film as Hitler would cling on to Walther Wenck to be his last Hope Spot, but Wenck's failure never got Hitler emotional, let alone angry, as he was after hearing about Steiner's failure. Not helping are the Hitler Rants videos, which goes out of their way to make Steiner as the go-to-general for Hitler's crazy demands (and naturally failing, which sends Hitler into another long rant). Indeed, Steiner's name in general seems to have become a byword in military circles for "big breakthrough that will never, ever happen."
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
  • Thanks to this movie, Rodan is often half-jokingly portrayed as a cowardly Quisling and Fair-Weather Friend who switches sides based on whoever’s winning at the moment... which is pretty much just a slight exaggeration of how the movie depicts him. Not helping matters is that he loses every fight he gets into in the movie, first against King Ghidorah: Rodan winds up taking a gravity beam to the chest and then is plunged into the Gulf of Mexico for his troubles. Then, during the third act, he loses against Mothra, who is much smaller than him. Though he did keep her on the ropes for the majority of the fight, he wound up with his shoulder impaled clean through by her stinger. Fans widely meme'd this moment with the line "The Lepidopterans send their regards."
  • King Ghidorah also gets an unfair amount of flack from the Godzilla fandom for: (1) getting curb-stomped by Godzilla in their underwater battle and needing a military intervention blunder to save him, even though this is justified by Ghidorah's Logical Weakness coupled with Godzilla's Homefield Advantage, whereas in their other clashes throughout the movie Ghidorah is at worst on equal footing with Godzilla or at best curb-stomps the Big G; (2) because Ghidorah needs Rodan on his side instead of against him to avoid being overwhelmed by Godzilla and Mothra when the latter two start working together (Godzilla and Mothra are two of the original three monsters required to match Ghidorah's original movie appearance in a fight, with Rodan being the third) and 3) One of his heads (nicknamed Kevin by fans) has trouble keeping on task and has to be strong armed into doing what he's told by the other two heads, making the third head an unintentionally comedic figure. Despite this version of Ghidorah still being an Adaptational Badass on multiple counts to the point where he's one of the most physically and combatively powerful iterations of the three-headed winged hydra short of Void Ghidorah.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Peter Quill, aka "Star-Lord" is introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) as a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass type; whilst he is a legitimately cunning, intelligent, adaptable and skilled space pirate, he also is a goofy Manchild and he blatantly yearns to be more famous than he is, which is most emphasized by the fact that virtually nobody uses the appellation "Star-Lord" that he tries to go by. Not helping is that he is also Overshadowed by Awesome, being a Badass Normal on a team of socially maladjusted super-powerful aliens where his greatest strength is he's the only one who can actually pretend to act like a normal, functional person, so he handles the social stuff. The sequel film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, largely continued this portrayal, showing him as flawed but also a legitimate badass type. The slightly greater emphasis on his Manchild attributes in this film took off, and led to the beginning of his downfall in Avengers: Infinity War, where Peter's own team starts openly dissing him in comparison with Thor, to the point the insecure Peter even starts trying to imitate Thor's own Baritone of Strength. He also gets the brunt of the blame from fans for Thanos’s victory in this movie due to his Tragic Mistake of interrupting Mantis’s sleep powers on Thanos, which seemed to be working completely effectively and giving the heroes a chance to defeat Thanos right then and there until Peter screwed it up. This is despite Doctor Strange’s earlier use of the Time Stone confirming that Peter’s mistake here didn’t actually make any difference in the outcome. The focus on Peter as a failure and a screwup continued into Avengers: Endgame, where he is repeatedly beaten up or dismissed by technical allies. Taken to its peak in What If…? (2021), where episode 2 asks the question "What if Yondu accidentally took T'Challa instead Peter Quill?" The answer: T'Challa goes on to be ten times the space-hero that Peter ever was, reforming the Ravagers from Space Pirates into a network of freedom-fighting anti-slavery crusaders, redeeming Thanos from his genocidal quest, and generally being more badass than Peter ever dreamed of being, even stealing Peter's title of "Star-Lord" and using it for himself despite having no reason to do so. And all that this timeline's version of Peter accomplishes is to become a lowly janitor slopping out the local Dairy Queen.
  • Kang the Conqueror and his Variants are set up to be the next main villains of the Multiverse Saga, villains of unparalleled mastery over technology whose domain over time and space make Thanos look like a playground bully. However, he has been found lacking and more of a Boisterous Weakling. His first proper show in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had him lose to the Ant-Man family, C-list heroes, while also getting "beaten by ants". While the context is that they were hyperevolved ants and they didn't actually defeat him, the damage was still done. Coupled with the fact that his Variants are killed in every installment they show up in (with Victor Timely being disintegrated repeatedly for Black Comedy), audiences began seeing them as more of a nuisance than a serious threat.
• In part due to the reputation he already established from his take on The Joker in the D.C. Extended Universe, Jared Leto’s take on Morbius in Morbius (2022) was received by fans this way as well. Soon after the first negative reviews of the film came out, memes such as this one became popular to mock how Jared Leto once again failed to deliver in a superhero movie. Similar to his Joker portrayal, his bizarre and unnecessary use of Method Acting during production, including his refusal to use the bathroom normally and inconveniencing production with those antics, was seen as hilariously pretentious just as before. The character on his own isn’t that bad or weak, but a combination of Jared Leto’s reputation and the film itself being a critical failure made fans end up treating Morbius the character as a loser due to these Real Life factors. However, in an accelerated version of what happened to characters such as Jar Jar Binks and Emo Peter Parker/Bully Maguire, Morbius the character ended up getting this reputation inverted by an ironic fanbase rather quickly, and now has an ironic Memetic Badass reputation among some of those who like to mock the film.
• Oppenheimer: J. Robert Oppeneheimer is frequently portrayed in memes as being a quirky, science-obsessed goofball who's so naive that he fails to realize that an atomic bomb capable of mass destruction could be used for mass destruction.
• Signs: the unnamed aliens' easily exploitable weakness (water) and the sheer stupidity of them choosing to invade a planet that's 70% made of said weakness - while unarmed and naked - is a frequent subject of mockery. That they can't get through wooden doors and can be beaten to death en masse by a single man of average strength with a bat doesn't help. They're near-universally cited as among the lamest alien invaders in fiction. Internet "who would win?" boards often jokingly invoke them as the lowest possible tier of combatants, with even lower survivability odds than Red Shirts
• Spider-Man 3:
  • Peter Parker himself becomes one in this movie once he bonds with the symbiote. A black-suited, more aggressive Spider-Man sounds cool on paper, but the way this movie portrays it, it simply turns Peter into a mean-spirited goofy idiot. He adopts an "emo" hairstyle for no real reason that makes him look ridiculous, engages in a whole bunch of downright bizarre antics such as yelling at his landlord for his broken door, putting his feet up on his boss’s desk and eating his candy, demanding that the girl who has a crush on him throw out the cookies she made for him to remake them with nuts, doing a strange dance which includes snapping his fingers at random girls while walking down the street (which became the film’s biggest meme all by itself for its sheer absurdity), and then tops that already-ridiculous street dance by doing an EVEN MORE over-the-top performance during his jazz club date with Gwen Stacey, which ends with her leaving him and then Peter accidentally punching MJ in the face while getting in a fight with the security (again for no reason). Even though the symbiote did actually amplify his physical strength to make him stronger than he normally is, the sheer amount of bizarre behavior that came from his personality change makes most fans completely forget about that part of it, and only remember him as an idiot Jerkass. In fact, fans tend to distinguish Peter bonded with the symbiote as his own character, Emo Peter Parker, just to distinguish his Memetic Loser antics from the character’s normal self. Even a later Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, took a dig at him by showing footage of his infamous dancing down the street with Peter adding the commentary "We don't really talk about this..."
    • Similar to the case with Jar Jar Binks, "Emo Peter Parker" got an ironic inversion of his Memetic Loser status in recent years by many fan videos rebranding him "Bully Maguire" (named for his actor Tobey Maguire combined with Peter’s playground bully antics in the movie), and treating him like a Memetic Badass in them. For example, fans have turned his random finger snapping into him snapping Thanos out of existence during Avengers: Endgame, edited him into killing Qui-Gon Jinn during The Phantom Menace while saying "how did that get in there?", edited his goofy walking into him outrunning the bus during Spider-Man: Far From Home, etc. Needless to say, while this is more in line with the actual effect that the symbiote had on him in terms of increased physical strength, the power boost gets so absurdly exaggerated that it’s pure parody material. Therefore, while the original moviegoers turned him into a Memetic Loser, newer fans have begun embracing him as the opposite.
  • Peter’s rival, Eddie Brock, also has this status for being a huge letdown, considering how beloved Venom is as a comic book Anti-Hero/villain. He spends most of the movie being a doofy Small Name, Big Ego (and unlike Peter, he didn't have the symbiote yet as an excuse). He also has an obnoxious Never My Fault attitude, blaming Peter for everything going wrong in his life even though all of these things are very clearly his own fault. For example, he fakes a photo of Spider-Man causing crime for the Daily Bugle to get in Jameson's good graces, and when Peter catches him for doing this, Eddie gets fired for faking the photo. Yup, that is totally Peter's fault that he lost his job, and not his own for unethical journalism! He doesn't even get his costume and powers until the very end of the movie, right before the final battle. Then during that one battle, he continues to remove his mask several times throughout the battle just to whine some more, as if we didn't get enough of that already! Finally, he has the series' most embarrassing Epic Fail of a death by far by diving directly into a bomb in his futile attempt to re-merge with the symbiote. Topher Grace usually does well, but this character simply wasn't meant for him.
• Star Wars:
  • The stormtroopers are so memetically bad at hitting their targets that they became the Trope Namer for Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. In reality, they are shown to be capable of shooting and killing characters without Plot Armor, like the rebels on Tantive IV at the beginning of A New Hope and the village in the opening of The Force Awakens, and a stormtrooper does non-lethally shoot R2-D2 and Leia in Return of the Jedi. Also, The Empire in Episode IV deliberately lets Leia escape so they can track the Millennium Falcon to the rebel base.
  • Jar Jar Binks is such a universally loathed character that he is quite easily considered the most noteworthy scrappy of all time behind the Trope Namer himself. The movies clearly meant to play him up as an incompetent buffoon, making him border on this status In-Universe already, but this intended portrayal plus multiple "jokes" involving him just being lame Toilet Humor plus being such an annoying racist caricature make this reputation in Real Life even worse to the point that most fans consider him to have singlehandedly ruined The Phantom Menace with his lameness. In-Universe he redeemed his reputation by doing well in the final battle, in Real Life he did not, especially because it’s clear to see that every single contribution he made to that battle was pure dumb luck meaning that he did not actually have any Character Development and simply had luck on his side. George Lucas saying "Jar Jar is the key to all of this" in the movie’s development footage instantly became a meme once it was discovered because of how unbelievably awful that idea was. Interestingly, he eventually somehow inverted this and became a Memetic Badass to some fans almost two decades later thanks to the popular fan theory about him actually playing up Obfuscating Stupidity to hide his true nature as a ruthless Sith Lord the whole time.
  • Even Qui-Gon Jinn gets this a little bit due to this popular video. He got this treatment even more after the events of Obi-Wan Kenobi when both The Grand Inquisitor and Reva were stabbed (the former by the latter and the latter twice by Darth Vader, with the first having happened when she was a child.) and managed to survive while Qui-Gon died from being stabbed by Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. They justify it by them being Dark Siders using The Power of Hate to sustain themselves (much like how Maul survived his bisection courtesy of Obi-Wan and Vader survived being burned alive on Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith.), which Jedi don't stoop to. Nevertheless, many have pointed out how these events make Qui-Gon look like a chump when he died. This is in great contrast to his actor, who is a well-known Memetic Badass.
  • In A New Hope, Obi-Wan describes Anakin as being "the best star pilot in the galaxy, a cunning warrior, and a good friend". However, fans enjoy mocking this flattering description of Anakin due to his behavior shown in the prequel trilogy. While most agree that he proved himself as a star pilot, he is shown losing to Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones almost immediately due to ignoring Obi-Wan and pulling a Leeroy Jenkins (even though he recovers and puts up a better fight shortly after, and then goes on to win against Dooku in the next film), which is seen as negating the "cunning warrior" description, and disrespects Obi-Wan at several points in the same film due to his whiny and entitled attitude (even though he is noticeably much more mature at the start of the next film), which is seen as negating the "good friend" description. While Anakin did match this characterization better in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, fans still enjoy ribbing Anakin for not living up to his reputation in the films themselves. It has even gotten to the point that whenever Darth Vader does something awesome but ends up losing his primary target (such as the Death Star plan or Obi-Wan), people take it as proof that Vader is indeed Anakin deep down.
  • A New Hope: Greedo became this after George Lucas edited his scene so that he shoots but misses Han Solo at point-blank range. Even LEGO got in on the fun with a Funny Background Event in Revenge of the Brick wherein Greedo repeatedly fails to hit a dartboard positioned only a few inches away from him. His infamous marksmanship forever defines him as the Butt-Monkey of the whole series, to the point that even fellow Rodians aren't safe from the misfortune that befell Greedo.
  • TIE fighters actually pull their weight in most engagements in the films, inflicting heavy casualties on the X-wings at Yavin. However, the video games used them as Mooks for the sake of balance, and they usually can't take more than one or two direct hits. Cue every EU work portraying them as flying death traps Made of Explodium. The films themselves would later double-down on this with incidents like the entire First Order starfighter corps being unable to stop a single X-Wing squadron in TFA, Poe destroying six of the fighters in five seconds (with one quarter-second burst each) in the same, three TIEs not only getting nailed by a girl with no training but getting over penetrated three times over by a single bolt from the Millennium Falcon's anterior gun in TLJ, a character shooting down a TIE with a bow in Rogue One, the protagonist taking out a TIE with a hand grenade in The Mandalorian miniseries, etc.
  • Speaking of flying deathtraps, the SF-17 StarFortress bomber in The Last Jedi. Their one appearance in the series involves a squadron of them being massacred by TIE Fighters due to being very big, slow targets that go up in flames from just a handful of direct hits, and while one of the bombers succeeded in destroying their target, it proceeds to get destroyed in the explosion of said target. One particularly notable moment is the scene where three bombers get destroyed at once by the flaming wreck of a TIE Fighter, cementing the ship's reputation as the worst design in the series to quite a few fans.
  • The Force Awakens: The film continues the trend with Kylo Ren. While he's an obvious stand-in for his idol and grandfather Darth Vader, he behaves more like a cross between Vader in the original trilogy and Anakin in the prequels, making him a bit of a Wangsty Psychopathic Manchild and a subject of mockery for some people (he has a popular parody Twitter account called Emo Kylo Ren). Not helping matters is the fact that he's a fairly inexperienced Force user, being defeated by two untrained lightsaber wielders (one of whom is likely not even Force sensitive) during the movie's climax. It's quite intentional, and The Last Jedi doubles down on it, playing his pathetic, entitled brattiness for both comedy and horror (because he is still a frighteningly powerful warrior in charge of a frighteningly powerful army, even if he is a childish, impulsive loser).
  • Bizarrely enough (and in a manner not particularly related to any of the movies), Yoda started getting this reputation in recent years, thanks to a series of shitposts and particularly bizarre memes portraying him as a racist, ketamine-addicted Mr. Plinkett-like deadbeat, often as the result of a messy divorce. The release of The Mandalorian only amplified this, with many fans joking that the real reason Yoda fled to Dagobah was to avoid paying for child support on Grogu.
  • The minor Jedi character Shaak Ti gets this treatment from fans when they realize that she more than perhaps any other character inexplicably keeps dying in different ways across multiple media, including not one but two deleted scenes where she is killed in Revenge of the Sith, her appearance in The Force Unleashed, a Force vision of the future Yoda has in The Clone Wars, and even LEGO Star Wars. Many fans ironically call her a Memetic Badass for being able to apparently resurrect herself, and at the same time unironically admiring her for at least being able to put up a good fight against Starkiller and General Grievous in Legends.
  • Speaking of General Grievous, many fans of his Legends depiction view Canon Grievous as this. While Grievous is supposed to be a feared Jedi-killer in both continuities, this mostly comes across as an Informed Attribute in Canon. In Star Wars: Clone Wars, he's an unstoppable Jedi-slaughtering machine, killing several Jedi Masters with ease. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, he only kills one Jedi (Nahdar Vebb, a recently-promoted Jedi Knight) onscreen and while he's able to hold his own against Jedi more effectively than most other non-Force users, the majority of fights end with Grievous either retreating or suffering humiliating defeats (he was once subdued by the Gungans, aka. Jar Jar Binks' race, though General Tarpals had to sacrifice himself in order for them to do so.) In Revenge of the Sith, he quickly loses to Obi-Wan in saber combat, but does nearly beat Obi-Wan to death when they fight hand-to-hand. Many parodies portray Grievous as a Harmless Villain who's obsessed with stealing lightsabers.
• Despite being the main villain and titular character of Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the titular Fallen is a bit of a joke in the fanbase, owing to how the final battle with him in the film is not only quite short, but also a Curb-Stomp Battle. Optimus not only defeats both him and Megatron, but ultimately kills the Fallen in about as comically over-the-top and brutal a fashion as possible: first ripping his face off (with the declaration of "Give me your face!"), then, while he tries to run away, punching through his chest and ripping out his heart. Not only did the scene forever mark the film version of Prime as a Memetic Psychopath, but it also made the Fallen into his most famous victim. There have been multiple official figures of the Fallen that feature removable faces.

Jokes

• Not even superheroes are exempt from this:
  "Riches, fame, and physical development don't change the fact that you're still a grown man living in his parents' basement, Master Bruce."

Literature

• Dracula: Dracula himself fell victim to this trope on Tumblr thanks to the popularity of Dracula Daily. Many a joke has been made at his expense over the centuries he spent planning his campaign to take over London, only to get driven out in the span of a few months by one small group of people. These include the solicitor that he tormented at the start of the novel, the solicitor's Badass Bookworm wife, and an American cowboy who managed to shoot him through a window. It did not help that Dracula chose to wear a straw hat as his disguise while escaping London.
• Goldilocks is known for being a random kid who goes into someone's house, uses and breaks their stuff, and then eats their food. Compared to other fairy-tale protagonists, who are normally sweet and friendly, Goldilocks comes off as a dumb brat. Many Fractured Fairytale takes on Goldilocks and the Three Bears either poke fun at her or end with her getting mauled and/or eaten by the bears.
• Harry Potter:
  • The entire Hufflepuff House has a reputation for being the "loser" house at Hogwarts due to them being made up of students who don't excel in bravery, intelligence, or ambition and being almost completely irrelevant to the plots and often being Flat Characters (especially in the films). Cedric Diggory is the only prominent member of said house in the series, and his biggest contribution to the plot was that he was killed off by Lord Voldemort. Dialogue from the books seem to indicate that they are memetic losers in-universe as well.
  • The Chudley Cannons, the Quidditch team Ron is a fan of. Word of God says when asked if they would win a game, "they'd need to replace the entire team and down several cauldrons of Felix Felicis."
  • Ron Weasley is often considered a loser among fans, despite his accomplishments, for his reputation as the weakest link of the main Power Trio. While Harry is respected for being The Chosen One and Hermione is respected for being The Smart Girl, Ron gets stereotyped as just being the dumb tagalong friend. Fans will often cite his actions in The Goblet Of Fire, where he briefly Took a Level in Jerkass AND Took a Level in Dumbass, despite him being at least somewhat better in both previous books and later books. The films also gave him several goofy scenes where he’s casually eating rather than worrying about the problem at hand, and The Half-Blood Prince in particular gave him some dopey facial expressions and antics at times that get heavily memed, but this was under the effects of a love potion clouding his judgment. With his out of character moments accounted for, he really isn’t that much less competent than his friends, and was even crucial to destroying some of Voldemort’s horcruxes.
  • Lord Voldemort for instigating the entire series by losing to a baby (to be fair, it was Lily Potter's magic protection spell, but still a fail nonetheless). This hurts Voldemort's pride so much that he spends the entire rest of the series (and his life) trying to kill this baby in revenge... that baby grows up and ruins Voldemort’s plans, sometimes re-killing him in the process. Even worse is that Voldemort is meant to come across as The Dreaded, but due to losing over and over again to the same kid almost every book, he comes across as quite incompetent. The film adaptations exaggerate his loser status; he was decently intimidating in the first two movies, but ran into some Narm in movies 4 and 5 due to his strange antics, and then became a full-on loser in movies 7 and 8 due to his overused "NYEEEEAH!" shout in the trailers, hilariously awkward hug with Draco Malfoy, sounding like he sneezed during his most important use of the killing curse, and then having the most hilariously stupid villain laugh before the final battle. Neither version of Voldemort is taken very seriously anymore, but at least the book version didn’t hit the unbelievable amount of cheesiness the film version did. This is actually inverted among the fanfic sporking community, who tend to get very angry when a "clever" author downplays the threat he poses, with the sporkers saying Voldemort would effortlessly kill or torture the OC or "improved" Harry because it amuses him.
• Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings is, in-universe, a fairly well-regarded elven lord who rules over one of the last remaining strongholds of his people and proved a rather successful commander in the War of the Ring. Unfortunately for him, he has the bad luck to be married to Galadriel, who, in a setting with very few prominent women, manages to be one of the most powerful and memorable characters in the entire trilogy. This leaves Celeborn, a somewhat bland character already, hilariously Overshadowed by Awesome. Tolkien also never came up with a solidly-defined background for him, leaving even lore-hounds often befuddled by how important he's supposed to be. Things go From Bad to Worse for the poor guy in adaptations, as multiple continuities have ended up adding Ship Tease or outright romance between Galadriel and other characters while downplaying his presence or writing him out entirely, giving him a reputation for being a cuckolded husband as well.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Gerold "Darkstar" Dayne is regarded this way by a good portion of the fanbase. This stems partially from his rather cheesy name, appearance and persona, with lines like "I am of the night" seen as trying too hard to invoke Evil Is Cool, crossed with the fact that for all his boasting and buildup as a badass the only thing of note he does is try to kill Myrcella Baratheon (an unarmed and defenceless little girl) a task which he fails at. This has led to his nickname "Dorkstar" and general perception as a whiny, pretentious Emo Teen and incompetent poseur with an over-inflated opinion of himself. he inevitable comparison is to the Red Viper, who is actually a badass.
• The eponymous character from Uncle Tom's Cabin was victim of this. Decades of Anti-Tom literature and Minstrel Shows transformed the once wise and self-sacrificing man into a simpering suckup slavishly devoted to his white masters from which the term "Uncle Tom" and thus the Uncle Tomfoolery trope is named after.
• Warrior Cats fans will never let Longtail live down getting beat up by a kittypet in the first book. To make it worse, Rusty couldn't have been much older than a kit, so it's basically like getting beat up by a ten year old who's never fought anyone before.

Live-Action TV

• 24: Kim Bauer tends to be the laughing stock of the series for being the Trope Namer of Trapped by Mountain Lions. The trope refers to irrelevant subplots that waste time from far more engaging main plots. The specific birth of the trope was when Kim got lost in the woods and encountered a cougar, which had absolutely nothing to do with the main plot of Jack Bauer trying to stop terrorists from nuking the city. It was far from the only instance of Kim getting into a random weird predicament and wasting episode time. She was only a main character in the first three seasons, and only got involved in irrelevant subplots in seasons 1 and 2, and her seemingly irrelevant subplot in season one actually did turn out to be orchestrated by the Big Bad and a huge part of his plan, meaning that season 2 was the only season where her subplots were truly irrelevant. It doesn’t help that she had so many of them within that one season, though... but she became so infamous for it that most people consider her the biggest loser on the show for her seeming inability to just have a normal day. Unlike the entire rest of the cast, this is without any of her misfortune even coming from the actual problems going on in the story! It really doesn’t help that her father, Jack Bauer, has Memetic Badass status, because it makes it look like the Bauer family apple fell very far from the tree.
• Arrowverse
  • The Flash (2014):
    • The protagonist himself, Barry Allen/The Flash, has gained this status in the fandom and jokingly referred to as "Jobber Flash" due to how he's far too reliant on his team, who do pep-talks or talk him through every step of the way. Its not helped that, rather than actually learn anything, most of the time Barry's just given more speed, but remains completely inept in actually using it.
    • The Rival, a minor villain from the start of season 3. He's evil speedster, a gimmick usually reserved for major villains, but is also a generic and totally weak bad guy with no discernible motivation; his only real role is to introduce the actual main villains of the season, Dr. Alchemy and Savitar. This has caused the fandom to jokingly treat him as a pathetic red-headed stepchild type character who's constantly being ignored by all the other, cooler speedsters.
    • HR is a heroic one, due to being a Non-Action Guy and Butt-Monkey who eventually turns out to have lied about being a scientist. Fans like to joke that he's either the biggest loser in the multiverse or the best actor in it. Possibly the latter, because he was shown to have deep-rooted anxiety and inferiority issues, and his Heroic Sacrifice became the only way to stop Savitar, saving Iris and their future. And the only reason Savitar was convinced he was 'Iris' due to his convincing acting during distress. It has gotten to the point that HR is also considered somewhat to be a Memetic Badass who can defeat anyone by just switching places.
  • Legends of Tomorrow:
    • Ray in some circles. Redditors keep a "Ray Palmer Fuck-Up" counter in the Legends of Tomorrow Sub-reddit. They actually got rid of the counter because they couldn't keep count anymore.
    • The Pilgrim has reached this status for a few fans as well. She's told to be the Time Masters' ultimate assassin but she never kills anyone, never gains a victory, and quite embarrassingly gets killed thanks to a child outsmarting her.
    • The Team as a whole seem to be this, as there's a lot of buzz about them being ineffective losers who've failed at every mission. In actuality, the only actual 'failures' they've had was the attacks on Savage in the 70s and the 50s, and assassinating Per Degaton, while the team has succeeded in foiling Savage's plot with the Soviets, halted his experiments in the 50s, stopped his use of the ATOM drones, as well as saved the future Star City from Grant Wilson, defeated the Stillwater gang, and defeated and deprogrammed Chronos, the Hunters, and the Pilgrim, and captured Savage while he's at the height of his power. However, their failures are just more memorable.
    • In particular, Rip's apparent ineptitude at time travel, given his repeated failure to kill Savage before forming the team, and his poor management skills when leading the team, has been the subject of much humor among fans. It was later revealed that the Time Masters had been actively sabotaging his attempts to kill Savage, but even afterwards the team still has a tendency to ignore his plans and just do their own thing (during a mission to protect the King of France from being assassinated, Sara slept with the Queen of France).
    • Nate to a lesser extent, thanks to how often he seems to forget he has a superpower of turning indestructible. The show's crew has openly admitted they really didn't think ahead when giving him such a huge Story-Breaker Power that's also a severe drain on the budget.
• Barney & Friends: Barney the dinosaur, due to massive amounts of Anti-Barney Humor.
• The Big Bang Theory: In-Universe, Raj worries in one episode about becoming this because all the other guys have girlfriends:
  Even if I get one someday, I'll still be the guy who got a girl after Sheldon Cooper!
• Big Brother: Frenchie from Big Brother 23 has reached such a point of infamy with how badly he played (essentially, he won the first Head of Household competition and went on such a power trip with it that he scared nearly the entire house, and then got voted out immediately after his HOH power wore off because of the massive target he put on himself) that any time a contestant has a chaotic or otherwise terribly thought-out HOH, they will inevitably be compared to Frenchie. For example, Kyle from Big Brother Canada 10 was quickly called the Frenchie of his season once he won HOH and made such bad decisions with it that he alienated his entire house. It even became a sort of Ascended Meme during the interviews with the new houseguests for Celebrity Big Brother 3, when incoming houseguest Mirai cited him as an example of how NOT to play Big Brother and used him as an anti-role model for good gameplay.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Xander Harris. The man shall always be 'The Zeppo' of the Scooby Gang, one of the guys who Whedon goes above and beyond the call of duty of putting through the wringer. His achievements (for the most part) are talking his way to victory (ex. bluffing a Mad Bomber zombie into running away on "The Zeppo", getting the rocket launcher to destroy The Judge, confronting DarkSide!Willow when she decides to wipe out the planet) rather than beat the hell out of the bad guy doesn't help. If anything, fanfic attempts to give him a level in badass tend to go the other way. Xander's Memetic Loser status has been sealed by the fact that other stories have started invoking his name to describe under-powered characters. (e.g. Bruno in Ms. Marvel (2014) calls himself and Ms. Marvel's other unpowered friends her "Xanders".)
  • "Dawn's in trouble? Must be Tuesday". Dawn started out as an annoying Damsel Scrappy and she will Never Live It Down with the fans. Despite being a relatively normal teenager, being around Buffy’s gang made her lack of superpowers alone look bad, but with her teenage angst Scrappy qualities on top of that she quickly made a reputation for herself as the most useless character on the show (as even Xander, listed above, could at least be considered The Heart.) She picked up the slack and Took a Level in Badass in Season 7, redeeming herself at least somewhat to many fans, but the fact of the matter was that she could never truly go beyond Badass Normal status and become a genuinely useful fighter like the rest of the group. She actually had a nice bonding moment with fellow Memetic Loser Xander over this.
• The Defenders (2017): Out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Netflix heroes, Danny Rand a.k.a. the Iron Fist easily gets the most Butt-Monkey treatment from the fandom. After Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all came across as cool, competent, and sympathetic heroes in their own series, Danny Rand gets portrayed as an Idiot Hero who lacks basic knowledge of social conventions due to being a Fish out of Water. His first scene alone is enough to make anyone have a major Facepalm at his impulsive decision-making and general idiocy. While he does have Character Development and becomes a more respectable person as his series progresses, especially in his show’s second season, the terrible first impression that he made tends to stick in fans’ minds above all else. In The Defenders itself, his Memetic Loser status even seems to catch on In-Universe where he gets disrespected by all of the other heroes (along with some other characters) at one point or another, culminating in Stick acknowledging him as "a thundering dumbass." He can pretty much be considered the television counterpart to the Marvel Cinematic Universe Films’ Peter Quill. It also really doesn’t help that even on paper he sounds far less impressive than his superhero peers:
  Reddit Post: The Marvel Netflix shows do such a great job at representing minorities that the films would never dare tackle. A blind man, a female rape victim with PTSD, a wrongfully-convicted black man with PTSD, a disabled vet with PTSD, and a rich white boy weeaboo.
• Doctor Who:
  • Dodo is generally regarded as one of the least-loved companions of all time due to her poor acting, inconsistent accent, lack of personality and development and being as dumb as the bird she's named after. After four stories, she was written out and was deemed so unremarkable that she didn't even get a goodbye scene. The expanded universe didn't treat her any better, with one book giving her an STD and another killing her off entirely.
  • Adric is another unpopular companion due to his lack of any likable character traits - arrogant, condescending, sexist, whiny, self-important, egotistical, smug and having a bad habit of siding with the villains. Like Dodo, his acting also left much to the imagination. He did at least get a heroic exit, albeit he died failing to save the world. As if that wasn't enough, one of the Past Doctors books reveals that he suffers from body odour.
  • Adam Mitchell, who was literally designed to be a companion that doesn't measure up due to being a conniving, selfish opportunist. He remains the only companion to ever been booted out of the TARDIS. Add in the fact that his actor had career-ending allegations against him and you have a character that even Big Finish won't touch.
• The Night King of Game of Thrones was built up for eight seasons as the ultimate threat, but the only thing anyone remembers about him now is that Arya kills him in two seconds with one straight stab to the gut. He doesn't even get a proper fight scene with anyone in the cast.
• Kamen Rider
  • Kamen Rider Decade: Yusuke Onodera has often been the butt of all jokes for his uselessness since he doesn't transform that much and when he does, he doesn't make any difference in fight scenes. He has been the measuring stick for how useless a character can be in a Kamen Rider show.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: Yua Yaiba/Kamen Rider Valkyrie from has been derided similar reasons, not that fans are particularly happy about it, mind you. When the show first began she was billed as a prominent character and the franchise's first female tertiary Rider, but by the second arc she's been Demoted to Extra and turned into Gai's puppet. Not helping matters, the only significant thing she does after that is inadvertently help set loose the Ark.
• Kitchen Nightmares: Amy and Samy from the episode about Amy’s Baking Company became such memes by themselves that they singlehandedly gave the entire show nearly viral popularity. This is due to them having incredibly egregious Never My Fault attitudes where they managed to blame pretty much everything and everyone except for themselves for their failing restaurant, despite both of them being very obviously at fault for everything going wrong. This includes them illegally taking the tips of their wait staff and firing one of their employees right in front of Gordon Ramsay for simply asking for clarification. They even managed to be the one restaurant that Gordon Ramsay had to give up on because of their refusal to listen to him. Amy being an odd Crazy Cat Lady and Samy having a sketchy past certainly didn’t help either, along with them invoking the Streisand Effect with incredibly antagonistic responses to the online criticism they got. No Such Thing as Bad Publicity initially worked in their favor as the memes brought a huge wave of customers to their restaurant, who wanted to see if they really were as bad as the episode made them look, though ultimately they went out of business for all of their problems anyway.
• Locke & Key (2020): the Lockes are widely regarded by fans as an entire family of subcompetent morons who can't make a cup of coffee without getting someone endangered, hurt, or killed. This is in no small part due to the baffling decisions they make over the course of the series, from regularly unleashing villains on the world to failing to use those all-important Keys when they could actually be of practical use. Every single member of the family has been roundly condemned by the show's fanbase at some point or another over the course of the show's three-season span, to the point that a few forumgoers have stated that they're rooting for the demons behind the Black Door, and some memes have gone so far as to suggest that the world would be a futuristic utopia if literally anyone other than the Lockes got their hands on the magic of the Keys.
• Rocky of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and its direct sequel Power Rangers Zeo. It's partially because of his replacement of Jason, but most fans point out even his focus episodes have him bumbling comedically and taking the most losses (being turned into a plant, getting beaten up and stepped on by King Mondo, having to be dragged through the Power Chamber by Billy). This was solidified in Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie when he somehow manages to break his back missing a spin-kick and is replaced by a 12-year-old kid....who is actually a more effective Blue Ranger.
• Once Upon a Time: In the show, Robin Hood is shown to be quite a competent archer, but the main thing a lot of fans remember him for is him repeatedly getting beat up or knocked out in battle, often overplaying how much it happens. One of the main things these fans like to use is him being immediately knocked out by Zelena right after making a bold statement about aiming straight and true. A lot of fans also try to play him as a deadbeat dad due to him not naming his newborn daughter until "he knows her" after leaving her not long after she was born. There's also a running joke among many of his detractors that he must be constantly constipated due to his actor Sean Maguire's habit of always scrunching up his face in a way not too dissimilar from someone who has to go to bathroom really bad.
• McManus from Oz. From the comment sections for clips on YouTube to the episode recaps on the late, great Television Without Pity, if the fandom is united on anything it's in dissing McManus for his incompetency, unreliability, and inability to not ask just about every female character out to dinner. Compilations of his lowest moments (be it getting shanked or otherwise insulted) are not uncommon.
• Revolution: The way the Hatedom tells it, Charlie Matheson is the biggest loser in the entire show. This is in spite of the facts that she helped get Miles Matheson back into the game, put a sniper rifle in the hands of a rebel group, and took down a number of Monroe militia members like Lieutenant Slotnick and Sergeant Joseph Wheatley.
• Star Trek
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: The red-shirted crew members of the Enterprise have a reputation for getting easily and anticlimactically killed by whatever the problem of the episode is, to the point where the term "redshirt" has become a byword for a very minor character whose sole purpose is to die. It actually led to a memetic "paradox" asking what would happen if a group of Imperial Stormtroopers started shooting at redshirts. The common joke is "the Stormtrooper fires and misses every shot; the redshirt dies anyway."
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Harry Kim. He spends the entire series as an Ensign, gets killed off and resurrected more than anyone else, gets kidnapped multiple times, and is the only character in the franchise to be formally reprimanded for Boldly Coming.
• Star Wars:
  • Cobb Vanth from The Mandalorian is a legitimately skilled Badass Normal in-universe, but unfortunately for him, the fact that he's wearing Boba Fett's scavenged armor (which does not fit him) when first seen makes jokes about him being a weird Boba Fett Fanboy who goes to work in cosplay all too easy and appealing, so that's the sort of portrayals he gets.
  • In The Book of Boba Fett, Boba Fett himself is seen as this in the eyes of many fans due to the fact that he becomes very Out of Focus in the second half of his own show, barely even appearing at all in two episodes, in favor of Din Djarin who, along with Grogu and his other friends, essentially become a Spotlight-Stealing Squad and were seen as basically hijacking Boba Fett’s own show from him in favor of more Mandalorian content. Notably, the show, along with Boba's appearance in The Mandalorian before it, was supposed to undo the Memetic Loser status Boba gained from his ignominious "death" in Return of the Jedi, but whether it actually succeeded is up for debate.
• Survivor:
  • Francesca Hogi was the sole two-time first boot on the show. Good luck not trying to get this status from the fans after that.
  • Despite him playing a "perfect game" on his first season, J.T. Thomas has gained this status after making a bunch of idiotic moves such as giving somebody from his other tribe that he never had a chance to watch his first season nor played with the hidden immunity idol on Heroes vs. Villains, telling Brad his tribe's entire plans at Mana/Nuku Tribal Council leading into Malcolm's elimination on Game Changers, and not bring his own hidden immunity idol when he was clearly at the bottom of his own tribe within that same latter season. It has gotten to the point that a good portion of the fandom credits Stephen for J.T.'s strong Tocantins performance over J.T. himself.
  • From the Australian version: Sam Schoers definitely qualifies, just for being the only player on any (English-language) Survivor version to have zero Confession Cam segments.
• Tokumei Sentai Go Busters: Hiromu of will forever be remembered for freezing in front of a chicken.
• The Walking Dead (2010): Owen, AKA the Alpha Wolf/ W Man. This man is supposedly the biggest villain in the first half of Season 6, but he ends up being the biggest failure of a villain ever. He ends up killing no named characters himself, gets his ass handed to him in every fight scene he has, and dies rather unceremoniously getting shot by Carol in the middle of an apparent Heel–Face Turn. After turning into a zombie he never kills anyone then either before getting put down permanently by the same guy who beat him up in his debut appearance.

Music

• The majority of Korean Pop Music artists are seen as this by J-pop fans due to their heavy rivalries.
• From the classical composers, Julius Fučík. Not only is his name awkward in English, but also his most famous work, "Entry of the Gladiators", is best known nowadays as the Standard Snippet in Happy Circus Music. Fučík wrote the piece to celebrate the champions of the Roman Gladiator Games, the epitome of manliness, but now it's associated almost exclusively with goofy clowns and afro-wearing zebras. Quite a big fall from grace.
• Ringo Starr of The Beatles has become a meme within the Beatles fandom, with many jokes centering around his awkwardness, gloominess, and for lacking musical and songwriting talent when compared to the other Beatles. The cartoon Family Guy once featured a short skit where Ringo writes a song and it's instantly placed on the refrigerator as if it were a child's drawing.
• Not as much the case today, but in the earlier days of the internet (late 2000s-early 2010s), teenage music artists on YouTube typically got this reputation almost automatically once they hit a certain level of popularity. Two artists in particular really got the worst of it.
  • Justin Bieber was mocked endlessly early on for his bowl haircut and “girly” prepubescent voice. It was extremely common to see Take That! potshots directed at him even on videos that had nothing to do with him. Even on videos that had nothing to do with music at all! At first he got even more hate when he desperately tried to turn his image around into something more “adult”, cutting his hair and sometimes acting like a Jerkass. But eventually, with the release of more radio hits and growing up naturally, public opinion softened on him. While he still has his haters, he’s no longer The Chew Toy of YouTube commenters.
  • Rebecca Black was the other teenage YouTube musician who got hit with this status. Her song “Friday” quickly got the reputation of being the worst song ever, due to being heavily autotuned, having cheesy lyrics, and a music video that includes teens who are definitely not old enough to drive cruising down the highway. However, unlike Justin Bieber whose Memetic Loser status simply faded away, Rebecca Black’s actually transferred to someone else once everyone realized that she was Mis-blamed for the song’s poor quality.
    • Patrice Wilson, creator of Ark Music Factory, eventually became the true Memetic Loser of YouTube musicians. While Rebecca Black moved on to produce better music, Ark Music Factory continued making So Bad, It's Good songs and music videos with various child singers who would inevitably get boatloads of hate, yet also boatloads of attention. Due to Patrice Wilson himself being the Recurring Character cameo in every song, it soon became evident that he was in fact the one to blame for all of the terrible music. Eventually, he had a Creator Breakdown which added to this, and has not recovered.
  • Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black being the Memetic Loser YouTube musicians of their time is most evident in the DEATH BATTLE! episode featuring the two against each other. Both get killed at a There Is No Kill Like Overkill level to the cheers of the YouTube commenters.
• Nickelback has the reputation as “the worst band ever” among so many people that making fun of them is not just a meme on the internet (which it is), but common practice when anyone talks about bad music in general. It is for, as many agree, every song sounding the same and for that being very noticeable because of singer Chad Kroeger having a Yarling Large Ham voice. Still, they have made many catchy songs that have been radio hits despite this.
• Machine Gun Kelly's foolhardy decision to drop a Diss Track attacking Eminem led to him being the subject of the highest charting diss track of all time when Eminem responded with a blistering Boastful Rap so strong it rebooted his own career after a brutal Audience-Alienating Era. Kells was so humiliated he went through a phase of getting booed off stage in his support slot for Fall Out Boy, before switching to making Pop Punk, leading to a perception that Eminem dissed him so hard he switched genres. When he then started beef with Slipknot's Corey Taylor, who revealed evidence proving Kells was lying about him in order to stir up drama, his reputation was sealed forever as a little irritant starting arguments with Gen-X-aged musical icons and losing — something he would incorporate into his persona in his album Mainstream Sellout.
• Sex Pistols: Originally regarded as a punk icon, Sid Vicious is now viewed as a go-to example for poor musical abilities, due to more people becoming aware of his bass playing skills being sub-par even by the low standards of punk rock.

Mythology and Religion

• Goliath from The Bible is only remembered as that abnormally large and heavily armored soldier who was easily killed by David, who was roughly half his size, far less experienced, and had practically nothing save for a sling and a rock. And, y'know, literally God's help on his side, but who cares?

Professional Wrestling

• Thanks to a screwjob finish, The Spider Lady became one. Originally managed by the Fabulous Moolah, Moolah would take the Spider Lady's mask after her "charge" failed to defeat Wendi Richter and "won" the belt from Richter herself, after which an incensed Richter, who had kicked out at one, unmasked Moolah. The original Spider Lady faded into obscurity and the gimmick would only be used by jobbers for the next 30 years.
• Unfortunately for the Wildcat Chris Harris of an otherwise well remembered incarnation of America's Most Wanted with James Storm, Braden Walker is largely remembered for his much more stellar career.
• Kevin Nash tends to mostly be remembered for the time he tore his quad on Raw while walking across the ring. He's hardly the only person to have suffered such an injury (Triple H has had multiple quad tears and Vince McMahon managed to tear both his quads in one night), his massive unpopularity with the Smart Marks made sure he never lived it down. Now the fandom is convinced anything he does will cause his quad to tear.
• Sin Cara, after botching one too many times during his tenure, has become synonymous with the word.
• As much as he is both loved and respected by fans, Sting falls here. Between his reputation as "The Dumbest Man in Wrestling"^note Because he was betrayed by all of his allies, with Ric Flair double crossing him at least twiceand rarely, if ever, winning any feud he was in, he has been firmly categorized as this.
• Kelly Kelly was, at worst, average in the ring, but fans often focus only on her earlier performances, exaggerated her weaknesses (such as being unable to properly run the ropes) and if you ask these fans why women's wrestling declined at the end of the 2000s, chances are that they blame her for it.
• Ashley Massaro has it even worse than Kelly. You'd be hard-pressed to find a single Smart Mark or diva fan that is a fan of hers and doesn't blame her for kickstarting the decline in women's wrestling (she came along before Kelly, right around the same time that fan favorites Lita and Trish Stratus retired). While she was hardly the only factor, she seems to get a fair share of the blame mostly due to how hard she was pushed and how little training she had been given. Diva Dirt writers loved mocking her. Though opinions on her have likely softened in light of her suicide in 2019.
• Becky Lynch. Not with her ring ability, but rather just her downright terrible luck with allies. Becky is infamous over the fact that the poor woman cannot keep a friend to save her life leading to her being compared to Sting with the amount of unfair backstabbing she is going through. Then La Luchadora (the Luchador Becky disguised herself on to fight Alexa Bliss) is impersonated by an unknown person (later revealed to be Mickie James) and distracts Becky to cause her to lose against Alexa Bliss, which basically means Becky was betrayed technically by herself.
• Rosa Mendes is universally agreed to have been the most useless Diva on WWE's roster, especially since she was employed for nine years (eleven if you count her time in developmental). She was used as a jobber, only receiving one televised win and that was via DQ. Based on this information, it isn't really "memetic" though.
• Marty Jannetty. Despite once being half of one of the greatest tag teams of all time, along with being a former Intercontinental and Tag Team Champion, Jannetty will be forever known as being "the untalented guy who was completely overshadowed by his former partner and fell into obscurity after the team broke up." Any wrestler who ends up on the bad side of a Breakup Breakout is dubbed "The Jannetty" of the group by the fandom.
• Mike Jones, better known as Virgil or Vincent, is probably the Butt-Monkey of professional wrestling. He was the bodyguard of both Ted DiBiase and the New World Order and provided about as much protection as a broken condom. He's also not very popular with fans, with there even being photos of him alone at wrestling conventions.
• Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake was once a fairly over midcarder in the WWF, until he got injured parasailing. Then he went to WCW and underwent so many gimmick changes that it became impossible to take him seriously. Not helping matters is that his best friend is none other than Hulk Hogan, so it's not uncommon for people to (understandably and not without justification) accuse Beefcake of riding Hogan's coattails. Nowadays he's commonly referred to as Brutus "the Fucking Barber" Beefcake in a derisive tone, thanks in no part to Ric Flair's son-in-law Conrad Thompson coining the term on his podcasts.
• As a general rule, Professional Wrestlers are this in comparison to players of Professional Sports, almost entirely due to the scripted nature of the Business. When you think about it, they have to have a more varied set of physical skills than most, they don't get an off season or time off so often have to perform injured unless the writers have nothing for them at the time for which they often don't get paid (which is its own can of worms), things that Pro Sports players take for granted. Not to mention particulars nowadays a lot of Pro Wrestlers do have legitimate fighting skills so you wouldn't want to call them this to their face in case they rearrange yours.

Sports

• German association football team Tasmania 1900 Berlin is always referenced whenever a team as a huge losing streak in the Bundesliga. They just played one season, were immediately relegated to never reach the highest level again and the had by far the worst season's record in Bundesliga history (out of 34 games, they won 2, drew 4 and lost 28 and only scored 15 goals).
• Several infamous "Draft Busts" are often referenced when a recently-drafted player fails to meet expectations.
  • In the NBA, the most infamous examples are Sam Bowie (picked before MICHAEL JORDAN), Darko Miličić, and Kwame Brown.
  • In the NFL, we have Ryan Leaf and JaMarcus Russell.
• The Chicago Cubs used to be this during their 108-year World Series drought (and still are in St. Louis).
• The Cleveland Browns have an absolutely abominable reputation among many United States football fans, enough that not one but two different fans made cracks about the Browns' lack of football prowess in their own obituaries. In 2017, they became only the second team in NFL history to finish a season with zero wins and sixteen losses, achieved the longest active playoff drought in the NFL, and are widely regarded as being one of the very worst, if not the worst teams in the entire league. This meme◊ perhaps says it all. However, by 2020, they Took a Level in Badass and not only did they make the playoffs for the first time in 18 years, they won their first playoff game in 26 years by beating their hated rival Pittsburgh Steelers.
• Haru Urara, a Japanese racehorse that never won a single race and ended her career with a miserable 0 - 113 losing streak. Haru gained national attention during the economic crisis of the early 2000s, and became a symbol of pluck at a time when the public needed one. People credited the horse with inspiring them to never give up and ultimately saved her home track from bankruptcy before retiring.
• Australian Rules Football
  • The St Kilda Saints have won only one premiership (1966), and hold the records for longest losing streak and most wooden spoons (last-place finishes) in league history.
  • The Gold Coast Suns, who joined the league in 2011 and are yet to make the finals. And by "finals", we don't mean the league championship game—"finals" is the Australian term for what North American sports call "playoffs". Of the 18 Australian Football League teams, eight make the finals.
• The Los Angeles Clippers are the NBA's perennial whipping boys. Like the aforementioned Mets, the Clippers live in the shadow of their wildly-successful crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers. Unlike the Mets, who at least play in their own stadium, and whose up-and-down tendencies gave them two championship rings and a host of signature players and moments to look back on, the Clippers have spent most of their history completely in the dumps while sharing Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center) with the Lakers since 1999, and even in their best years, they've never made it to the Western Conference Finals until 2021, infamously blowing two 3-1 leads in the conference semifinals before even getting to that point in time.
• The New Orleans Saints spent a solid 20 years in the NFL's doghouse from their founding in 1967 up through the mid-80s. The team's stats were consistently abysmal, with local fans usually referring to them as the "Ain'ts" rather than the Saints. In the 1980 season, they lost their first 14 games, prompting local sports journalist Buddy Diliberto to recommend that fans start wearing paper bags over their heads at home games so that they could not be associated with the embarrassments happening on-field. Many fans took his advice. The team finally started getting competitive in 1987 (their first winning season ever), then champion-caliber from 2006 on, with coach Sean Payton and quarterback Drew Brees leading the team to its first Super Bowl win in 2009.
• The 1899 Cleveland Spiders team, generally agreed to be the worst in MLB history. They only won 20 games due to their owners forcing all the good players to go to St. Louis. They were so bad, the Spiders got an amateur baseball pitcher to play their final ever game.
• National Hockey League
  • The Toronto Maple Leafs are technically the second-most-successful team in the NHL's history in terms of the number of Stanley Cups won, but they have not even made the final since their last win in 1967, and the seeming inability of even good Leafs teams to advance in the playoffs has made them a punchline in the NHL. Most recently seen in 2021, where they entered the playoffs as the #1 team in their division only to lose in the first round to their hated rivals, the Montreal Canadiens, who were the lowest-ranked team from any division to make the playoffs. Even worse as the Leafs had a 3-1 lead in a best-of-seven series, only to lose the next three games straight. (They also got knocked out in the first round in 2022, but as that was to defending champions the Tampa Bay Lightning, it didn't sting as bad.)
    • The nadir of this loser status came in February 2020, when they lost a game to the Carolina Hurricanes...who was using an emergency backup goaltender... whose day job was a zamboni driver... who worked for the Maple Leafs (ok, technically their AHL affiliate but still). Toronto's humiliating loss ruined any chance they had of making good trades before the trade deadline, while David Ayres, the EBUG in question, became a folk hero to the NHL fans.
  • The Buffalo Sabres are also a frequent target for this sort of humour.
• Scuderia Ferrari in Formula One is considered a laughing stock as, despite having the biggest budget in the category, have not won a championship since 2007. Between uncompetitive cars or terrible strategies, fans have grown to the idea of not wondering whether Ferrari will make a terrible mistake in the next race, but when.
• While it's unrelated to his performance in the NBA, it became a popular trend in the 2020s to post RapTV-style infographics accusing LeBron James of making an infamous rookie mistake in a video game, such as holding W while rocket jumping in Team Fortress 2 or switching in on a super effective move in Pokémon.
• Among basketball fans, Tony Snell's name has become a byword for contributing nothing to your team thanks to an infamous 2017 Bucks vs. Jazz game in what was an otherwise solid season for him, which he closed out with an unprecedented zero in every stat despite spending a good 28 minutes on the court.

Tabletop Games

• Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded from Magic: The Gathering was clearly intended to a terrifying villain, being a dimension-traveling half-demon man driven only by his joy in inflicting pain on others. However, this bloodcurdling concept didn't carry over to his extremely mediocre actual card as it can be easily ran over and takes ages to set up his good effects that are not worth the ridiculous amount of effort. It didn't do Tibalt any favors that his card was packaged in a Duel Deck set in which he is pitted against Sorin Markov; because Tibalt's story appearances were zilch afterwards, fans speculated that Sorin killed Tibalt in their fight that presumably lasted seconds before Word of God stated that he is still alive but elsewhere. This reputation has lessened in recent years as people have come to be distanced from his bad first card, allowing them to appreciate Tibalt's character in itself, culminating with an appearance in Kaldheim where he imprisons a god, steals their identity, and starts a short-lived war on the plane.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Abbadon the Despoiler, or, as fans like to call him, Failbaddon the Armless. Though the character canonically is a very badass and dangerous villain and is one of the most dangerous units in hand-to-hand in gameplay, the fact that he led no less than thirteen crusades against the Imperium and still failed to destroy it led to the development of his fanon portrayal as a General Failure. Even after the Gathering Storm books started to turn things in his favor (and even then, it's a Pyrrhic Victory), he hasn't quite shed his Failbaddon reputation. (As for the "armless" thing, it's because the arms on his old resin figurine fell off quite easily.) Note that most of this doesn't line up with the lore at all; the earliest Chaos material listed off exactly what the first twelve Black Crusades were for, none of which were "destroy the Imperium" and all of which succeeded at their actual goals.
  • While the Imperial Guard is acknowledged to be full of hardcore individuals, as a whole they will never escape their reputation as useless and squishy, losing horribly to anything the galaxy can throw at them. However this is mostly a reputation crafted by their fans, who love the idea of them suffering horribly but still getting back up. The Gathering Storm event mentioned above helped them get points in badass because even to the very end, Cadia didn't fall. The planet tore itself apart from a Negative Space Wedgie, sure, but in terms of "the Guard was defeated and Chaos conquered the planet", no, it didn't fall.
  • And then you have the Planetary Defense Forces, who are seen as this by fans and by the Imperial Guard in-universe. It's not exactly their fault, since the PDF tends to be made up of anyone who didn't meet the IG's recruitment standards, has Armchair Military superiors at best (and outright traitorous Chaos-worshipping seditious nobles/ Tyranid catspaws at worst), have equipment the IG finds laughable (and IG equipment is often compared to T-shirt and flashlight in comparison to the stupidly powerful standard weaponry the other factions have), and more often than not their planet is taken completely unawares by the threat of the day.
  • Very, very few players still take the Avatars of Khaine seriously. They're supposed to be fragments of a War God, embodied in a giant statue of pure, mobilized rage, but in terms of storyline they're usually just heavily crapped on by anyone the GW writers want to look good. Khaine himself ends up taking a bit of splash damage from it too, though he's too fragmented to be much of a character anyways.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Rainbow Dragon, thanks to being a "boss monster" that even in its own archetype is vastly outshined by other options the archetype has, ^note Crystal Beast are more known for their ability to get Rank 4 Xyzs out on the field, or back in the day, being able to summon Hamon, Lord of Striking Thunder and generally having lackluster effects for the amount of trouble needed to go through in order to summon him.
  • Sangan quickly became this thanks to a series of cards showing his trip to where banned cards go and his terrible luck along the way, along with shades of being The Woobie.

Webcomics

• Roy in almost every Awkward Zombie comic he appears in after his exclusion from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While some of his loserdom is very much deserved, becoming an extremely petty and jealous person after his exclusion, that doesn't excuse the rest of the roster of fighters collectively forgetting about his existence, Master Hand blowing him up twice, or his own old roommate Marth barely tolerating him upon his return as DLC. He was barely even an afterthought when he was announced alongside Ryu.
• Dragon Ball Multiverse: Raditz's usual portrayal is as this. Besides losing on the first round on the main storyline, a minicomic was published which made fun of the concept.
• This Hark! A Vagrant comic parodies the tendency of Sherlock Holmes adaptations to portray Dr. Watson as a bumbling idiot who doesn't really contribute anything to solving the mysteries by having a shorter, fatter Watson who mistakes a jar of jam for evidence replace the original, who complains "a brave, intelligent ladykiller wasn't interesting enough?"
• Mayor Christian Weston Chandler from Sonichu gets this treatment for being an Author Avatar, being very corrupt, and taking up more page time than the title character.

Web Video

• On Barshens, Barry just can't catch a break. He typically ends up last in games, either through his own ignorance or Stuart's mastery of everything. Though sometimes, Barry gets robbed of victory thanks to Paul's incompetence.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • Raditz, to the point that Vegeta and Nappa use him as a substitute for "weakling" and measure Power Levels in "Raditzes" (Nappa is five Raditz, and Vegeta is fifteen Raditz). The second season extends this to the point where he's used as a measure of currency (Around one dollar).
  • Krillin combines this with Lovable Coward. Krillin Owned Count, anyone? But in the end, Krillin finally gets his redemption when he hooks up with 18. It comes complete with the destruction of the Krillin Owned Count.
  • And of course, Yamcha. In one video the characters even state that the only reason they make fun of Krillin so often is because Yamcha isn't around as much. Word of God posits this is also the reason it wasn't called the Yamcha Owned Count.
  • This compilation video sums it up quite nicely.
    Yamcha:: Let's be honest. If I stay, I'll probably just get in the way.
    Tien: Yep.
    Piccolo: Probably.
    Gohan: No offense.
    Vegeta: Why are you even here?!
    (Beat, showing Yamcha looking hurt)
    Krillin: SENZU BEAN!
  • Hell, just about every team has their own Memetic Loser, as if there's a diversity quota or something. Raditz is this for the Saiyans, Appule is this to Freeza's force, and Guldo is this to the Ginyu Force. The androids have Android 19, the poorly programmed fat mime.
• Escape the Night has Roi and Teala. In canon, Roi is very unlucky and often placed next to the way smarter guests. In fanon, Roi is usually The Ditz and The Klutz. He is not too far off from being Too Dumb to Live. He becomes an Expy of Tyler from Total Drama. All of Roi’s better qualities are removed and his lesser qualities are exaggerated. Teala is often portrayed as having no qualities that could be useful, but a dozen qualities that make her unfit to do a task or useless. The only good thing Teala has on her side is luck, which she only uses to never get picked for a challenge despite getting seemingly every vote against her. Teala being a Memetic Loser is not too far off from her canon counterpart, who only survives as long as she did through dumb luck.
• The YouTube parodies of Downfall frequently portray Adolf Hitler, a once feared and powerful man, as a slapstick magnet or a genuinely incompetent villain where his plans constantly fail, usually at the hands of Hermann Fegelein. He gets a fair amount of abuse in other series like The Frollo Show, especially in a scene where there's a question designed to send Scanty on a risky mission instead of him...
  Stocking: The first one to name five German cities won't go.
  (Smash Cut)
  Hitler: That question was hard! Why did it have to be so hard?!
• Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque : La Série Abrégée: the Silver Saints. Whenever they get a mention by the characters, it's either as a synonym for "weakling" or to reference the fact they are essentially being used as cannon fodders by the Great Pope.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: Sasha, despite being a capable leader and skilled fighter in canon, is often portrayed in fanart and fan works as an awkward, insecure, unstable mess who regularly gets flustered around Anne and/or Marcy. Her occasional Not So Above It All moments such as her Inelegant Blubbering when saying goodbye to Grime in the finale only added fuel to her memetic loser status.
• The protagonist of Caillou is a rather normal four year old boy who has his fair share of temper tantrums. Due to a Periphery Hatedom, Caillou is often portrayed as a whiny brat and a Butt-Monkey. This is especially common in GoAnimate works.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Ma-Ti, to the point that this very Wiki named a trope after the supposed lameness of his powers. When in actuality, Heart Is an Awesome Power, and much more practical than say, his fellow Planteer Wheeler's ability to accidentally burn down a forest if he's not careful (to say nothing of having a power that can never be used directly against the enemy since a children's cartoon could never get away with setting people on fire).
• The Fantastic Four (1978): Magneto, one of the biggest Marvel villains, gets relegated to a massive joke who gets outsmarted by a wooden gun.
• Invincible (2021): While the Guardians of the Globe managed to put up a decent fight against Omni-Man, Darkwing fell into this trope when he attempted to fight Nolan by...just dropping from the ceiling in an attempt to ambush him, which got him thrown around like a ragdoll to his death. It's especially stupid considering Darkwing is the show's resident Batman Parody, yet didn't have any sort of contingency plan in place if Omni-Man went rogue.
  • Or it's a Take That! at the very notion of Batman's contingencies; that in an immediate close up encounter Batman can react fast enough to anything Superman can do, or in a pre-prepared instance (in the event Batman has anticipated this exact scenario) that Supes, himself very smart, hasn't come up with countermeasures of his own.
• The titular protagonist of Johnny Test is supposed to be cool In-Universe, but due to the show’s extremely vocal Hatedom, the character tends to only be remembered as being insufferable, and as a result of that, a loser, to many Real Life viewers and non-viewers alike instead.
• The Legend of Korra: Mako, whose loserness is mostly played up by shippers who don't like him due to both his girlfriends breaking up with him then being in a relationship with each other. Even prior to that much of his hatedom portrayed him as a loser during Book 1 for being seen as a Jerkass cheater. Ironically many of these fanworks had Korra and Asami ditching him for each other, or Asami outright only using Mako as an excuse to get near to Korra (with the common joke being an amazing driver like her couldn't just bump into a boy accidentally like that). Back then Korra/Asami was a pure crackship.
• The Legend of Zelda (1989)’s incarnation of Link isn’t that bad if strictly compared to typical 80s cartoon heroes, but when compared to the several well-regarded video game incarnations of Link (and he is usually compared to the video game Links) he is definitely this. Fans tend to ignore any good qualities in favor of only remembering his annoying catchphrase “Well, Excuse Me, Princess!” and his several failed attempts to get a kiss from Zelda. He is usually brought up as the prime example of why Link should always be a Silent Protagonist, claiming that this incarnation’s personality is proof that he should never speak again. He got a little redemption during his Guest Star appearance in Captain N: The Game Master where he was portrayed as more competent and finally got his kiss from Zelda, but sadly for him this appearance usually isn’t remembered by fans.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twist is usually mocked because of her dorky appearance and the lispy way she speaks.
• Scooby-Doo gives us Scrappy-Doo. You know you’re a memetic loser when you have the “character hated by the fanbase” trope NAMED after you. This reputation mainly came from him being a Fearless Fool, causing more trouble for Scooby and Shaggy than he was worth, and being a failed Kid-Appeal Character who was so disliked that the following incarnations of the series have mostly pretended that he never existed in the first place. That is excluding the 2002 film, which brought him back as the villain (therefore, putting him in a role in which he’s meant to lose) solely to provide Catharsis Factor for the fans.
• South Park: Al Gore is treated as this in-universe by the entire town. Apparently, he desires attention and appreciation for his hunt for ManBearPig, but unsurprisingly nobody cares.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Mina is very unpopular among the show gallery of villains, the fact that she was defeated by Meteora twice, couldn't handle Toffe in the past and she only become a menace thanks to Moon did not help at all, This is of course forgeting she has shown to be a capable warrior before becoming unstable and being to face both normal Mewmans and Monsters on his own, still she's often portrayed in Fan Works as a Big Bad Wannabe at best and a complete joke at worst, Some go even further and show her taking Ludo's place in the first season in the new Earth-Ni, which is basically an annoyance they had to face once in a while and none characters take seriously.
• Steven Universe:
  • Pearl became this around season 2, after it became clear that she had a somewhat obsessive crush on Rose. While the show itself depicts this as unhealthy and a tad selfish, fans tend to jokingly exaggerate it to Pearl being a pathetic loser and stereotypical "nice guy" who expects love in return for being decent but can never get it.
  • Steven himself ended up getting this after the series finale of the original series. Some of the memes portray his classic design as a crybaby who can't deal with threats to Earth in comparison to other "badass" characters while some have his Future design either try to redeem other characters through song such as Eric Cartman or even Hitler (mostly due to places like Twitter consisting of bandwagoners who hated the ending of the original series or have never watched the show) or getting insulted by other characters.
• Super Friends: NONE of the Super Friends are particularly cool in hindsight, not even the ones based upon badasses. To elaborate:
  • Even if they were all busy saving the world Once per Episode, like Batman, they're still this. It's common in parodies for the Super Friends to be portrayed as overly friendly, old-timey, cheesy heroes that wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the Darker and Edgier later interpretations of the Justice League and what they go up against.
  • As noted above Aquaman gets this a lot because of his Super Friends version. Unlike the other heroes on the show though, for a long time it tainted the public's perception of him in other media as well (hence why he also gets his own mention in the comics section).
  • The Wonder Twins are often mocked and parodied for having a cheesy power set. Zan, the one that could take the form of water, gets this twice as hard because of how his power looks next to Jayna's ability to turn into any animal. As pointed in a Cartoon Network spoof commercial he could be beaten by a sponge...and not even an evil sponge. The New Adventures of the Wonder Twins play up their uselessness for Black Comedy.
  • The original Wonder Duo, the powerless kid sidekicks Wendy and Marvin (and the Wonder Dog!) also get this often because of their perceived uselessness and unexplained presence (the powerless kids get to hang out with the all powerful grown up heroes, why exactly?). ^note The comics got to explain why they were there: Marvin's mother was the original Diana Prince that Wonder Woman named herself after, Wendy's uncle was a police officer that trained a young Bruce Wayne before he become Batman. In one comic, alternate versions of them show up as the kids of the villain known as Noah "The Calculator" Kuttler and befriend the Titans only to later get either mauled to death (Marvin) or severely injured (Wendy) by The Wonder Dog (or rather, a shape-shifting demonic dog owned by Ares), deconstructing their presence in a superhuman setting. Wendy at least managed to re-invent herself as the Handicapped Badass Proxy, Barbara Gordon/Oracle's associate and sort-of Junior Counterpart.
  • The Super Friends versions of Hawkman and Hawkgirl are often mocked for having the ability to fly... on a team with an overfilled Flying Brick quota that already has that covered and then some. In a The Fairly OddParents! spoof, Veronica became the Hawkgirl parody "Hawkgal" who had "all the powers of a hawk and a gal!" And she was the last to arrive at a fight each time because how slowly she flew in comparison to the others, and then had her butt handed to to her once she actually got there.
• What If…? (2021): Tony Stark appears in five episodes and is killed off in all but one, with his death strongly implied in a sixth episode. Once fans noticed they quickly started joking about how unlucky he was in the multiverse. Eventually the series' head writer A.C. Bradley acknowledged the pattern in an interview and referred to him as "the Kenny of What If...?".
• X-Men: The Animated Series: Jean Grey is mocked for being utterly useless. She constantly needs to be saved and she faints every time she does anything. The absurdity of it gets to the point where she loses to a power cord. It's often joked that Scott screams her name out of his frustration with her instead of concern.

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