|
|
|
|
 | This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab. | |
|
Related to Dear Negative Reader and Writer Revolt, this is when someone who is involved in the production of a work and is known for interacting with the fans by, for example, writing a production blog or answering fandom's questions, or regularly appearing at conventions, stops doing so because, at least in their opinion; some fans become so thick and heavy (and ugly) that their previously fun activity has become a burden and is no longer enjoyable.
The fans complain to and about the creator, hassle them to an unbearable level, constantly asking questions that the creator has already stated he will not be answering, and constantly doing unspeakable things. Because a small handful are ruining it for everyone else, the creator stops whatever fun interaction with the fans they were doing. This tends to give people the impression that said creator is a Nice Character, Mean Actor (or just a nice work, mean creator in general), even though it wasn't the fault of the creator at all.
Even worse, the fans in question tend to somehow feel they have a right to run completely roughshod over the creator, and that any complaints from him are not only unjustified but deserve to be punished by further bad acts.
This is especially bad towards things that people actually do as a hobby, or out of personal enjoyment. Many a rant has been made by harassed creators/producers/personalities/celebrities who state that they actually could be off doing better things and not putting up with Fan Dumb / Hate Dumb, or that their life is already stressful enough with their other job(s) that they really don't need to come home from a long day's work just to be hassled by entitled bastards. And many a rant towards pirates have been made saying that they actually need to make money or else they won't be able to produce further installments.
Complaints often arise up from Schedule Slip. It's been pointed out that very few people who do webcomics (for example) actually make money off of them, with most of them doing it as a hobby. When things in real life pop up such as health issues, it's always the webcomic that has to go first.
A Sub Trope to Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Common tropes that result in this include Unpleasable Fanbase, Internet Backdraft, Fan Dumb, Hate Dumb, and GIFT. Be Careful What You Wish For is often invoked. Can sometimes result to an Internet Counterattack and Complaining about Complaining, making things worse. Very often a case of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero on the part of the fanbase. In some cases, this tends to induce into a Creator Breakdown, with the most extreme cases ending in a Take That from the author to the fanbase within the work, sometimes in the presence of a Straw Fan.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Akira Ishida (who voiced Xeloss in Slayers Next, Kaworu Nagisa in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and many other roles) stopped recording character image songs, or publicly singing in general, after one too many fan complaints about his singing voice.
- Kubo Tite runs a really funny Twitter account whereupon he pretty much confirms the image Bleach fandom has of his real life self. Then someone had the bright idea to blithely congratulate him on chapter 400 before it was even released in Japan.
- Takami Akai, one of the founders of Studio Gainax, ended up leaving the company after having addressed so many complaints about the Off Model animation in episode four of Gurren Lagann. In his own words, reading these comments was "like putting [his] face next to an anus and breathing deeply."
- Heero Yuy's English voice actor, Mark Hildreth, said he would never work on another Gundam-related dub because of all the negative comments he received from fans about supposedly butchering the character's voice. Unfortunately, he made this statement after saying he was told to play the character as stiff and emotionless by the vocal director, meaning fans who've seen that He Really Can Act won't get the chance to hear him play Heero properly.
- Ironically, they DEMANDED that someone who sounded like him be chosen for Gundam Musou and other works. Granted, these were probably entirely different sets of people, but it does seem Hilarious in Hindsight how that would work out.
- Suehiro Maruo once let slip he avoids unpaid appearances for expecting this result.
- Naoko Takeuchi took Sailor Moon away from Italy for 10 years simply because a local "psychologist" there claimed that "Sailor Moon makes little boys gay", and it all went downhill from there. Small wonder, if any, if Italian Sailor Moon fans have an intense hatred for Vera Slepoy (the aforementioned "psychologist").
- Voice actor Vic Mignogna does his best to be friendly and open with the fans, but eventually had to say he wouldn't be doing Edward Elric "short rants" or saying "Roy Mustang looks dead sexy in a miniskirt!" on request any more because it was getting old. He's also been frustrated by Yaoi Fangirls who ask for / demand validation of their Shipping, which is probably why he outright lied when he made those comments on a certain Clamp character, which teed off Clamp fans, because well Clamp, now he's a persona non-grata to that fandom.
- Manga has gotten a reputation with American bookstores for being frequent targets for theft. Some of the major ones responded by putting sticky metal security bars (the ones usually reserved for electronics) inside the back cover. Anyone who buys these then faces the tough decision of keeping them in with the annoying added thickness, or try and remove them and risk ripping the page.
- Then you get the loiterers who treat said manga section as a library and throw the books on the floor after they're done damaging the merchandise for actual customers.
- Fortunately, for a certain large bookstore chain at least, they use a different form of security tag specifically designed to go inside books, which has a minimal risk of damaging the book itself. However, at any given time you can go into that section and find the tags (or, baffling enough, the UPC codes) strewn all over the floor.
Comic Books
- This story
 from Mark Waid (it begins about halfway down the page). He did a phone interview with a Vermont radio station and, after the interview was done, was invited by one of the interviewers to visit their comic shop in Vermont for a signing and meet-and-greet with the fans. Waid agreed, only to discover they did not actually have a comic shop and just wanted him to visit them. He likens it to the movie Misery and explains that he has warned all his fellow authors to be wary and make sure they are not deceived by the same fans. He does not say anything about never meeting fans again, but you can bet he is a lot more reticent about it.
- Alan Moore is said to have stopped attending comics conventions because some fans at a United Kingdom Comic Art Convention followed him into the washroom to seek his autograph.
- The early 2011 comments shutdown at the blog The Source at DC Universe was the direct result of a flame war about who was faster: Superman or The Flash.
- Fred Perry went on a short hiatus after a rabid fan pushed an old lady and her grandson out of the way and threw down some cheesecake when he tried to deny he "took commissions for that sort of thing".
- www.jimshooter.com, Jim Shooter's personal blog, has not had any actual activity since May 2012. Some theorize that the comments sections had become raucous and ugly and that Shooter finally pulled the plug.
Fan Works
- Fanfiction authors have sometimes been known to remove fanfics due to flame wars and Ship-to-Ship Combat happening in their reviews, or being sent offensive emails about ships the mailer does not like.
- The Creator (Haley) of The Reid Oliver Cartoon Saga, based on the popular As the World Turns character Reid Oliver stopped making the cartoons shortly after the show ended because she found out someone else was profiting from her work and claiming it as their own. Pretty sad considering The actor playing Reid admitted that he had liked the cartoons he had seen.
- Be The Seadwelle Lowblood: ckret2 posts a poll to determine which character is shown next. Options are tied for quite a while, then one choice suddenly takes over. ckret2 decides foul play is involved, takes neither popular option, and stops with the polls.
"There is no way that many people have voted, MUCH LESS that it stayed that perfectly tied for so long, MUCH LESS that the votes suddenly jumped up for one side that much. I KNOW there were some people who voted specifically to make it balance out, rather than vote for what they actually WANTED. Some of y'all in here admitted that. Clearly, someone else is spamming Vriska now. Fuck this shit. You're not getting Vriska or Kanaya. You're especially not getting Vriska, since it's at least confirmable that there is somebody cheating in her favor, if not that there are folks cheating in both's favor...Way to go! We're never having a vote again."
Film
Literature
Live-Action TV
- This "stepping back" blog entry (spoilers for Torchwood).
- Warren Ellis' critically acclaimed Global Frequency was turned into a critically acclaimed pilot which was leaked and heavily torrented to fanbase acclaim. The sheer speed and amount of piracy, of course, understandably had network execs worried about things like advertising revenue. To this day, some fans still blame The CW for not producing the show, though there was news in 2009 that they ordered another pilot.
- iCarly: Before Season 3 had started airing, Dan posted a script fragment from a future episode◊. He took it down quickly, but it was reposted on various sites. Naturally, shippers from both sides went nuts, especially on LiveJournal. After heavy criticism about Dan ruining the fandom and the LJ communities with his interaction he quit and deleted his LiveJournal, without warning or notice (meaning the fandom lost a lot of interesting interaction with him), and eventually set up his own blog site, which he claimed was for better control, but his first post was about being pissed off with responses to his script.
- One speculated reason for why Legend of the Seeker wasn't renewed for a third season was that fans of the Sword of Truth books were so vocal about the changes that were made that the networks were afraid to advertise the show.
- Whiny fans who never stop complaining about "imperfections" is why Steve Roberts of the Doctor Who restoration team stopped writing articles about the Doctor Who DVD restorations.
- Back in the late '90s, before Lexx developed a fan base that was rabid when it came to Michael McManus, who portrayed Kai on the show, he was known to dote on the fans, even the squeeing fangirls. There is an especially cute story of him leaving an autograph session, announcing that he wanted a beer and inviting a nearby group of fans to join him. After a few years of non-stop stalking and harassment at the hands of fangirls with no respect for boundaries, McManus eventually stopped interacting with fans all together, becoming almost reclusive.
- Joseph Mallozzi, a writer and producer of the Stargate series in general, has had a blog on and off over the last decade. Each time he comes back, the blog is more and more regulated toward the fan hate and complaints that had eventually flooded his last blog.
- TV mega forum Television Without Pity: Aaron Sorkin's experiences on the site during The West Wing's heyday led him to roundly mock it on an episode. Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars, also avoided the show's fandom after run-ins on TWOP.
- Dave Chappelle became disillusioned with Chappelles Show both because he felt that it had turned into a minstrel show and because he had begun to realize that a good deal of his fans were idiotic whites who took the humor at face value and thought that hearing a black dude saying "nigger" repeatedly was hilarious; in addition to that, he was also getting extremely tired of people shouting "I'M RICK JAMES, BITCH!" at live standup appearances to the point where he was drowned outnote there was even a case where someone walked up to him while he was with his family and recited the phrase at him, something that eventually resulted in him blowing up at the audience and telling them that he gave them too much credit and that they really were every bit as stupid as the network execs said they were.
- Bradley James of Merlin temporarily abandoned his Twitter account after certain portions of the Fandom began to leave unpleasant comments about his girlfriend Georgia King and co-star Angel Coulby. Strangely enough, he didn't find his "fans" hassling two women he cares about particularly endearing, and despite an attempt to calm things down◊, Georgia shut down her Twitter account and Bradley cut down considerably on the use of his own.
- CBS limits Audience Participation on the American version of Big Brother after the earlier attempts at Audience Participation wound up with the Boring, but Practical players left and people from the players' hometown repeatedly calling in to save their person. In 11, they held an audience vote to decide who would receive the power of coup d'état, which would be a Game Breaker to whoever got it. During this vote, texting would cost $1 a text but you could vote on the site for free. Ronnie's wife botted the site in Ronnie's favour and then posted instructions on how to bot the site for Ronnie's sake. People took this and made counterbots to the site so that Jeff or Jordan would win the power. CBS then made it so that you could only vote a maximum of five times, and then, on consecutive votes, randomize the houseguests positions on the map so you couldn't just mindlessly click on the same spot and then vote a hundred plus times.
- And for America's vote, they put in efforts to limit bots. You had to have an account and could only vote ten times total. This didn't stop a bunch of people from making Sock Puppet accounts and voting in Brendon to compete against Lawon in a totally balanced and fair competition to return to the house, though.
- The Price Is Right. Drew Carey opened his own personal blog on the show's website and within days (not weeks as was expected), ruthless fans (most of them from Golden Road.net) began attacking him. One took his commentary too far and pushed Carey into disabling comments temporarily. Since July 3, 2008, a lot of users over at that website had been hurling all sorts of invective at Carey and Fremantle Media over the firing of Roger Dobkowitz and various other things. When Carey disabled comments, he made a blog entry announcing that he had disabled them, and in this blog entry he stuck it to the fans by calling them "telephone pole screamers".
- Miley Cyrus deleted her first Twitter account, not only as she reportedly lost her privacy and was addicted to Twitter, but due to death threats she recieved for posting pro-homosexual/lesbian rights statements on her account. At the time, her account had over 1,300,000 followers. She's returned, of course, but posts less frequently and more discreetly, and certainly sticks up for herself more tersely. (She also asks her fans not to flame those who criticize her.)
- Alton Brown of Good Eats had this problem, no less than twice. First when he decided to open up an Email portal on his website and was promptly rushed with all sorts of unsavory things. The portal was closed down. Years later, he finally relented and opened up a Twitter account with similar results. He seems to have returned to Twitter, however.
- Before and during the run of Babylon 5, J Michael Straczynski was very active on Usenet, Compuserve & GEnie forums dedicated to the show, with well over 10,000 posts from 1992 through 1998. Constant harassment by a few fans led him into several ill-advised flamewars. Claudia Christian's departure from the show led to middle-of-the-night phone calls and death threats. He's never been as active online since, though he does have a Facebook fan page now.
- Dish customers won't be able to watch AMC anymore (and that includes The Walking Dead) due to an unrelated lawsuit involving Dish.
- Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman left Twitter after one too many insulting tweets by angry fans.
- Doctor Who and Sherlock executive producer/head writer Steven Moffat deleted his Twitter after receiving death threats from Fan Dumb. Possibly related: when Jenna Louise Coleman first got the part of Clara, one of the very first pieces of advice she was given was "Stay off the internet."
- When spoilers for the entire second season of Bomb Girls leaked and were spread around (against the production company's wishes, mind you), fandom reacted extremely negatively, mostly Shippers whose only concern was Betty/Kate becoming canon. Soon after the series was moved from a Wednesday to Monday time slot and there was a long mid-season hiatus, leading to a drop in viewership. Then Global TV announced there would be no third season with only the possibility of a TV movie in winter of 2014 to wrap up all the Cliffhangers. Cue more negative reactions.
- When Ioan Gruffudd first got famous with Horatio Hornblower in the late Nineties and early Naughties, he really seemed to be enjoying interaction with fans on-line. He was even paying a considerable sum of money to run a web-page where fans could send him greetings and kudos and he would often reply. Fans were also collecting and preserving rare stuff like videos from his child actor days or various interviews. When he got engaged, supposedly many a fan-girl could not deal, forgetting that Celebrity Crush is supposed to be for fun. They started sending hateful messages directed at his fiancée. No wonder Mr Gruffudd refused to pay for that.
Music
- Trent Reznor declared he would stop most of his Twitter usage due to various unpleasant posted comments. He still posts plenty of updates, but most of them tend to be news-related rather than personal now.
- Yoshiki of X Japan was pretty much chased off the internet for much of 2009 and half of 2010 in a massive flare of Fan Dumb, Hate Dumb, GIFT, Internet Counterattack, and Internet Backdraft that originally started when he canceled a planned concert in Paris. He came back to the internet in 2010 on Facebook and Twitter, and is currently back but is still occasionally bothered by trolls.
- In a related phenomenon, The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. The complexity of some post-Revolver tracks exceeding what could be performed live was part of it, but another factor was that their fans went so crazy whenever they showed up that they couldn't hear themselves play over the sound of the hysterical shrieking, were trapped in their hotel rooms by mobbing fans whenever they went anywhere and had to be ferried around in armored cars to prevent being torn apart in the near-rioting that surrounded them.
- There was also another factor. The crazy anti-Beatles hatedom that emerged after John Lennon's "we're Bigger Than Jesus" comments, complete with record burnings, boycotts and picketing of Beatles concerts, convinced the band that touring the US wasn't worth it, as they'd just have the Moral Guardians dogging them at nearly every leg of the tour.
- The last straw was probably an incident at the August 19 concert in Memphis where an audience member threw a firecracker on stage. No one was harmed, but for a split second everyone thought the loud noise was a gunshot. They gave just five more concerts after that.
- Disturbed, for a time, used to answer fan questions on message boards, spending the most of their time being badgered to prove who they are. The sad thing is, this was started by David Draiman with the other band members saying it wasn't worth trying till they eventually warmed up to the idea at David's urging. With the relationship soured, they'll probably never do this again.
- As of 2011, David is tweeting and still getting stupid/rude questions. One of the more common ones is "Will Dan/Mike/John get a Twitter?". His response is "They've expressed a strong interest... not to."
- This is, quite likely, the reason why most music-formatted radio stations no longer freely play song requests. Of course, this doesn't stop the frequent complaints of "you never play this song" coming from the listeners — but it is now easier for the radio programmers and disc jockeys to ignore them, and just program what they want to play.
- John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats now destroys all his outtakes, the result of an (especially embarrassing) unreleased album being leaked.
- He also destroyed an entire planned EP due to repeated requests for illegal mp3s on his own forum.
- Randy Blythe of Lamb Of God explains why he had to deactivate his Twitter account. It came down heavily in part to this trope.
- In the late '90s, while Nas was working on his album I Am...The Autobiography, a bunch of tracks were leaked to the internet. In response, he rewrote a great deal of the album in just a month. The fanbase generally believes that the finished album suffered for it.
- Subverted with the Guns N' Roses cover of "Look At Your Game, Girl", an Easter Egg track on "The Spaghetti Incident?". Axl Rose stated seven years after the album's release that he'd remove the song from future pressings of the album because the public kept misunderstanding his interest in its author, Charles Manson (yes, that one). To this day, the song is still on the album and even has its own track number.
- Not too long ago, a disgruntled Protest The Hero fan posted an angry rant about how he waited in line at their bus after a show for an autograph, only to have his paper returned before being told to go away. Cue the band posting their side of the story, which turned everything upside down: not only was the dude in question notorious for hunting down bands for autographs so he could turn around and sell them for a LARGE profit on eBay, but he had apparently done it to them before and they weren't about to be fooled again, and while they were totally fine with giving autographs, they were most certainly NOT fine with people getting autographs just so they could make money off them. While they did not change their stance on giving autographs, they did imply that the possibility of their refusing to give them increased whenever someone did what he tried to do.
- Ringo Starr publicly refuses to sign autographs anymore because a lot of people have sold his autographs on eBay for huge prices (several others have the same policy, but Ringo is the only one who has made a video about it). Roger Waters has also publicly lashed out at these "autograph collectors," though he still signs from time to time.
- Zayn Malik, member of UK band One Direction, temporarily deactivated his Twitter account due to the hateful comments he received, in extreme cases being called a "terrorist".
Newspaper Comics
- Bill Watterson of Calvin And Hobbes would occasionally sneak signed copies of comic collections into his local bookshop. He stopped when they started showing up on eBay.
- Rumor has it that one of the reasons Watterson stopped doing Calvin And Hobbes was because his "fans" effectively stole the trademark for Calvin away from him. You know all of those cutesy "Calvin is praying" or "Calvin is Peeing on Something" stickers you see on the back windows of all those trucks and cars? Yeah... they weren't authorized by Watterson (who licensed a very small amount of merchandise, and nothing like those stickers). By the time the cartoonist found out about them and moved to stop their production, they'd become so ubiquitous and widespread that a judge told him he'd effectively lost his own trademark because he didn't act fast enough. Nice going, folks.
- The Other Wiki states that people selling such things were forced to change the caricature to avoid infringement. Not that it would have changed his anti-consumerism stance on Calvin And Hobbes goods and general strong intent to have the "brand" fade away as much as possible.
Sports
- Athletes will occasionally take potshots at their fanbase or former fanbase once they leave. Willis McGahee infamously antagonized the city of Buffalo by claiming the team should move to Toronto because Buffalo was boring and poor, and that the women were ugly.
- By the same token, some athletes refuse to sign autographs since a lot of memorabilia dealers use children to solicit them from athletes and then run home and put the item on eBay.
- Likewise, some athletes refuse to talk with fans after certain fans trash stadiums or engage in hooliganism.
- Sports statistics web pages sometimes have these. One semi-popular page has had its sole webmaster consider shutting it down because of some fans who regularly harass him when he doesn't update on time, especially due to real life issues. One time, his wife (and even his son!) felt like responding to some of these emails saying "Sorry we've not updated - the funeral's on Friday if you want to pay your respects."
- Wilfried Zaha, Crystal Palace ace, has taken to snapping at people on Twitter (and plans to leave the site altogether) after losing his temper with a group of abusive, unpleasable fans.
- Fireman Ed, the New York Jets' unofficial mascot, was the team's most famous fan for 32 years but retired his persona in 2012 claiming that he had gotten fed up with the increasingly aggressive and negative behavior from his fellow Jets fans.
Tabletop Games
Toys
- Minor example but it still counts: BIONICLE's Big Bad had No Name Given, instead known by his title of "Makuta". When an entire group of Makuta were introduced, head of story (and fandom's resident Word Of God) Greg Farshtey went ahead and revealed that his name is "Teridax". The fans weren't exactly thrilled with this name, and said so in no uncertain terms. As a result, Farshtey canceled plans to reveal the name of the other big No Name Given character, the Shadowed One, rather than deal with backlash again.
- A less minor example, similar to the Transformers one below: Bionicle set designers did intend at times to join BZ Power's forums (where Farshtey himself posts), but decided against it, not wanting to expose themselves to the immense fan hate whenever a new line of sets is revealed. But this is more of a "Why certain fansites can't have nice things", because set/piece designers do visit other boards where they don't have to worry about being attacked.
- Transformers designer Aaron Archer used to be a regular poster on a message board, with his own section where he would answer questions. Then someone had to go moan at Hasbro, allegedly because Archer was unprofessional and rude, almost certainly actually because the complainer was jealous that another board had such a major draw. Hasbro promptly declared that it was over.
- Bob Skir of Beast Machines also had a closer relationship with the fans than most official entities, but the on-line community was so harsh towards the series he co-wrote, that he decided to break up. He didn't attend the fan conference he and his partner Marty Isenberg were invited to either (nor did Marty). Thus, they are both still among them.
Video Games
- City of Heroes developers have been known to take sabbaticals from the forums due to particularly intense fans. The original powers designer was permanently driven from the forums due to extremely rabid fans.
- This trope is often cited, though not by name, in the official World of Warcraft forums, as reasons why Blizzard refuses to reveal specific details of upcoming plans for the game, up to and especially including release dates for new content. It's an open and possibly unanswerable question whether fans of the game are driven crazier by lack of information or by being given information.
- Moderator burnout is apparently a very real problem due to the game's vast virtrolic fanbase. There have been highly publicized outbursts by certain controversial mods in response to particularly egregious instances of Fan Dumb that reportedly got them taken off the staff. Many serious players refuse to read the official forums entirely, preferring to read the official Blizzard posts through third-party aggregators. Case in point, With a jar of ashes.
- Blizzard developer and forum "bad cop" Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street deals with the community exclusively through blogs now, partly for this reason.
- In the game itself, originally the Forsaken could speak common (the same language as alliance races) but this was removed because they used it for verbal griefing, causing them to switch to a new language with no justifying lore.
- Similarly, the Dance Studio was never made because the very first thing beta testers did with it was make the characters look like they were having sex.
- Mike Pollock, the current voice of Dr. Eggman, once used his Eggman voice in a fan interview to say "Snooping as usual, I see" and "I hate that hedgehog!" by request. Once he figured out the significance of the former, he declared he would not do vocal requests again.
- Part of the reason that Half-Life 2 got delayed for so long (aside from Valve Software's usual punctuality) was that after it was debuted in several trailers, some bright light decided to steal the source code.
- Valve has had much better dealings in face to face encounters; when Gabe Newell encountered a couple of protestors sitting in front of the Valve offices bearing plaintive placards asking where the hell Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (or just Half-Life 3) was, he just explained he couldn't tell them and it was cool, though someone else did have the cops escort the folks off on loitering charges.
- Valve was beta-testing Dota 2, and used to send people more than one invite so they can give it to their friends. However, after these invites started popping up for sale on eBay, Valve stopped giving more than one invite.note This used to be the case; now a ton of people are receiving upwards of five extra invites per day. It may help that Valve added the Steam Marketplace for those invites to be sold on, where they gets a little bit from each sale and what money the seller does get is in Steam Wallet funds.
- Valve used to be pretty prompt with replying to people on the Steam forums for Left 4 Dead 2, but after the Fan Dumb kept flaming Valve for everything that went wrong or how Valve never fulfilled its promises, it's no surprise that Valve doesn't bother to reply to people on the forums anymore unless it is something important.
- Almost happened with Overkill Software, makers of PAYDAY The Heist. After the player base discovered how to unlock the secret in extreme and borderline ridiculous requirements, a good chunk of the players trashed Overkill for not making the secret easier to access and claimed Overkill made the clues to the secret too obscure. Overkill had second thoughts of doing more secret hunts and also had second thoughts with interacting with the community after the fallout, but both parties eventually cooled down and things returned to normal.
- As of mid-February 2013, the "/me" chat command, which colored a user's text for action messages, is no longer available to anyone, because there were a few users who believed that the colored text meant the person talking to them was clearly a Valve employee and promptly got their accounts stolen.
- Crysis, due to its high requirements, was widely pirated, often just to use as a benchmark. When the sequel was announced to be not only on the PC, but the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well (in part because pirating is a lot harder on consoles), the series' PC fans cried bloody murder, worried that the lower capabilities of consoles would result in a lower-quality PC version (which turned out to be correct).
- Demigod had faith in its fans and released the game sans Copy Protection. The result? An estimated 93% piracy rate that choked the servers to death and caused review scores to plummet thanks to untold amounts of lag and connection issues.
- For that matter; a lot of Copy Protection and DRM in general, as you can see from several other examples on this page. It used to not be as intrusive as it was; yet because of people who decided to pirate the game anyways, and then the "heroes" sticking it to the man who pirated it out of spite pirated it anyways to "justify" their piracy, thus further "justifying" DRM. So thanks a lot, guys, nice to let developers know they can trust us.
- The big problem is the standard Ubi/EA-driven style of DRM is usually just so badly-designed that it treats every user like a pirate, and as such hurts legitimate buyers far more than actual pirates, who completely rip that nonsense out. Smarter devs have begun making the checks game-internalised however, instead of dropping the barrier at installation or startup, such as the infamous Batcape not working in Batman Arkham Asylum or the invincible pink Arachnoid in Serious Sam 3. Samurai Deeper Kyo on the Game Boy Advance had an excellent trick as well, a hidden check on the rom would flip a switch making all bosses invulnerable, which had the unintended result of people nabbing the pirated version just to show how long they could last for bragging rights.
- Sadly, we won't get an English translation to Sa Ga 3 nor to a Summon Night game. Crimson Nocturnal has shut down due to people complaining about slow updates and requests.
- Some sources claim that the real reason CN has disbanded is because of their leader's large ego combined with internal drama over translation styles, and this isn't the first time he has broken up the group (which almost caused the death of the SaGa 2 translation.)
- Capcom of all people has really turned against fans in the last year or so, after cancelling the much anticipated Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man Universe. There was a huge backlash for it in which they claimed it was the fans' fault for not joining the Devroom program and contributing to it. However, when the game was first revealed, they never disclosed that part and just added it as a way for fans to help out but never said it was an integral part of the overall game. There have been several petitions reaching almost 50K followers to bring the project back, but to everyone's disdain, they have dismissed it and said that that they have no plans of bringing it back. To make things worse, Mega Man himself wasn't included in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Capcom later decided to add "Bad Box Art" Mega Man in Street Fighter X Tekken. Some fans believe that this was Capcom's responses to the criticism.
- "Bad Box Art" Mega Man was actually requested by Inafune himself, not as a meanspirited joke, but that it was a more "interesting" idea than having Zero as the franchise's representation in a Capcom vs. Whatever game for the fifth or so time in a row. The timing of the reveal, though, makes it come off as an attack.
- The blame towards fans regarding Mega Man Legends 3 came from Capcom of Europe, not CoJ, the branch making the games. In hindsight, it kind of makes sense as many of the Mega Man games have not seen a European release. There are also complications that came from development regarding the game which prevented it from even getting greenlit.
- While no Mega Man appeared in UMVC3, Zero received a DLC outfit to swap him with Mega Man X himself. There was also the fact that Mega Man has not translated well into a fighting game and Zero has always been amongst the most popular characters of the franchise, outdoing Mega Man and X.
- This also stemmed from the fact that Keiji Inafune himself requested Zero and Tron to be in the game before he left.
- Jagex stopped holding holiday events in Runescape for years because people constantly complained about not getting what they expected.
- They also tend to no longer state release dates because of the same reasons other companies do, miss one day and the forums flood with complaints.
- They also bound event items to one's account after the party hat accidents.
- League of Legends doesn't often hold IP boosts to get a special skin and only really holds skin & champion sales because their already bitchy fanbase kept whining about it.
- Also, it's not entirely uncommon for the devs to be driven from the forums due to rabid fan dumb. For example.
- Surprisingly averted with Minecraft. After Fan Dumb DDoSed the multiplayer servers (because they wanted Notch to release a Minecraft update, no less), they're pretty damn lucky Notch didn't just give them the middle finger and took them down permanently. He was also surprisingly okay with update 1.8 being leaked early, as it gave the fans a chance to find bugs so that they could be fixed before the official release. In fact, ever since that leak, Mojang themselves have been regularly leaking the updates early.
- Zig-zagged with emerald ore. Endless complaining from the fandom with regards to its rarity eventually made Jeb remove it from the game. Then after that, endless complaints about its removal forced him to put it back in.
- CliffyB of Epic Games announced that the sequels to the original Gears of War would not be released on PC, as the PC version of the first game had been so thoroughly pirated.
- This seems to be a bigger problem with FPS than anything else, as FPS is perceived by the general public to be the 'easiest to make,' followed by certain styles of RPG. You just don't see such piracy numbers pulled for RTS, strategy, or simulation unless the company adds a draconian DRM, in which case people who would never buy the game in the first place see it as a way to 'fight back,' as what happened with Spore. Another factor is the fans of those two genres who actually come online seem to be among the most vicious, as a trek through any BioWare forum will show. Sometimes the creators themselves have to step in and lay the smackdown on especially racist/sexist fans.
- Many gaming channels on YouTube won't do Minecraft videos because of the monomania demonstrated by Minecraft Fan Dumb, who keep downvoting non-Minecraft videos while endlessly shouting that they want Minecraft videos.
- Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya will not answer Twitter questions regarding games in that series past the first title, due to Capcom's burning bridges with him and most of staff of Clover Studios, as well as the fact that DMC questions would oversaturate his Twitter feed. He will either respond with a terse "whatever," pretending he doesn't know what the asker is talking about, or (in the case of persistent questioners) will curse the asker out. Late in 2012, it was rationalized that he would intentionally dodge some questions because he had inked a deal with Nintendo behind the scenes to create a sequel to Bayonetta for the Wii U and didn't want many details leaking out, although the deluge of fan rage concerning that title has devolved into Kamiya harboring a loathing of foreign Twitterers.
- Battlefront, makers of beloved wargame Combat Missions, simply want no more to do with WW 2 as it gets so many armchair commanders dropping into the site to tell people whom actually served (either then, or any war since then) how terrible their tactics are despite how problematic logistics were or any number of other factors (a mild subversion as this has nothing to do with fan vs creator but the disrespect amongst the fans to each other). They had been planning to drop it for their other lines for some time and make more modern wargames, but the flame wars were the final catalyst.
- For that matter, the exploitation of a Good Bad Bug in a multiplayer game could be considered this because people would report it, causing it to get fixed in an Obvious Rule Patch the following week. Sometimes even hours or days. However, for every person who stormed on the boards complaining about an exploit being fixed, there were about one or two others thanking people for fixing it.
- People who stream their multiplayer games live have been known to stop doing so because someone they were playing against came into their stream and used it to spy on them. This is especially prevalent in games like StarCraft II, Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars, and League of Legends
- Similarly, people who do a Let's Play of a game or stream games live can get harassed by trolls and Fan Dumb alike until they disable comments entirely or worse, not do their Let's Play ever again. This can get upsetting for the rest of the fan base who legitimately like the content.
- After the "Hot Coffee" scandal with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, the "Second Edition" rerelease removed mod support entirely.
- Video game magazines who release trial CDs of games or special promotional codes often have to either give people codes or release it in a plastic-bag because people would go into the store and take the CDs or codes out of the magazines so they get it all for free, when these perks were to reward people buying the magazine.
- Mario Kart DS had decals players could show off on their kart and could be drawn to be anything they desired. Naturally, everyone made crudely drawn breasts and penises. Nintendo removed the custom decal feature in all Mario Kart games after that and has the karts use the character decals instead.
- Dynasty Warriors Online used to have an arena mode, which was basically a smaller, faster confront mode. The only thing it was used for was gem farming, so item drops were reduced. This still didn't fix the problem, so the staff decided the only way to fix the problem was to remove the Arena all together.
- Subverted with Mass Effect 3. After the incredible backlash Bioware had received from the original endings to the game, they responded by announcing the Extended Cut. Though they expected it wouldn't change every fan's minds about it (and it didn't), it was certainly a lot better received and managed to tone down the rage.
- However, possibly played straight when the two Co-Founders of Bioware retired from their positions in October 2012, saying that they had planned to since April and gave EA sixth months notice. They vehemently deny that the Internet Backlash had anything to do with it, but the fact that they announced retirement a month after the game came out does not help their case.
- Masahiro Sakurai, director of the Super Smash Bros. series, has stated he will be tweeting less. His reasoning—and he is 100% correct—is that whenever he talks about a video game he enjoys the overspeculative fans take it as a cue for the game's representative being in the next Super Smash Bros..
- CBJ, one of the devs of X Rebirth, calls fans out on the endless whining about there being very little news from Egosoft about X Rebirth for about a year and a half. When they were posting a screenshot a week, people started demanding more info and videos, at which point ES basically said "screw this."
- Nintendo had an uproar when it was revealed they were claimingYouTube content that had Nintendo IPs in them so that the videos would now run Nintendo ads with all advertising money going to Nintendo instead of whoever posted the video regardless if they had monetized the video beforehand. Well after about four years of people monetizing Nintendo videos, technically violating copyrights (you cannot profit off the copyrights of others without their permission first — YouTube even states that partners can't profit off Lets Plays), Nintendo finally decided to put their foot down. At least they're not removing videos, getting channels deleted by copyright strikes, or suing people.
- The proof is some of the Broken Base are of the Entitled Bastard variety saying "Nintendo stole from us!" and "Nintendo had no right to do this!" This uproar could have been averted if fans had inquired to Nintendo years ago about monetizing Nintendo videos instead of monetizing anyways assuming Nintendo would be ok with it just because everyone else can monetize most content by other parties or just foregoing monetizing in the first place and post Nintendo videos for the fun of it.
Webcomics
- Brooke McEldowney had Comics.com turn off the commenting feature for his 9 Chickweed Lane comic after a few Trolls made persistent homophobic and misogynistic remarks while another posted links to 9CL strips with pornographic dialogue substituted for the original.
- This is a major problem for artists in the Furry Fandom; one of the biggest sources of furry drama will invariably be about an artist being driven out due to their art being stolen and reposted elsewhere, usually because they're too lazy to buy the artwork from the artist, themselves. Sometimes, however, they actually have people taking credit for the artwork. Some of the places where the artwork is being reloaded will help the artist out by putting them on a DNP (Do Not Post) list and punishing those who break it...but that's small comfort when most of these cases are followed up by Internet Backdraft over the artist leaving, making a bad situation worse. Other times, artists have to shut down their messages or commissions due to obsessive trolls and drama that breaks out whenever they open commission slots and are immediately filled by people who apparently wait all day for journals like that and then snipe the journal. Or, some people were just remarkably bad customers. Furries have been harassed at conventions and have said they would not be attending future events.
- Tessa Stone, the mind behind Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name, revealed a spoiler on the true nature of Ples Tibenoch to a select few fans, confident that they wouldn't go and spread it around the fandom. Three guesses what happened there.
- This is the reason why there is no more forum for the VG Cats webcomic.
- Tom Siddell, author of Gunnerkrigg Court, used to occasionally make GC-themed desktop wallpaper for the fans—sometimes a larger version of a panel from the latest page, and sometimes completely new art. When some fans complained that he wasn't also making widescreen versions of these pictures, he decided to stop altogether.
- Tom also used to respond to reader's queries on a "Questions for Tom" thread on the Gunnerkrigg Court forum. He stopped, not so much because people asked the same questions, but rather because other readers would jump in and answer the questions themselves, making it a "Questions for Whoever Feels Like Answering" thread. He took his question-answering to a formspring account. However, when fans began repeatedly asking questions on topics he had stated he wasn't going to answer—and then getting combative over his not answering—Tom deleted his formspring account. Fortunately, some months later Tom decided to give it another shot and reopened his formspring account.
- While he permits it to be written, the author of Tales of the Questor makes it a deliberate policy to never, ever read fanfics of his comics, because he knows he would go mad from the desire to dive in and re-edit...
- Ratfist: When political discussions in the Shout Box started turning into flame wars with every new page, Doug TenNapel disabled comments below the pages. However, this led to the creation of an off-site Ratfist forum.
- It's been rumoured the Flind arc of Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic was designed to introduce furry characters, then brutally murder them at the end of the plotline, as a result of constant questions about the strange lack of 'furry presence' in a D&D comic. Outside of the minotaur and the sphynx there's really nobody else who'd count as 'furry' and it seems like it's going to stay that way.
- Moon Over June is possibly an example of this, with Woc having recently disabled commenting on her newest strips. This change came quietly, but after a short story arc which was met with much criticism by the readers.
- When RPG World began to lay fallow, the artist was content to leave the site running until it became a haven for an exceptionally rabid collective of trolls. When the trolls retaliated at the author's later input to the site, he took down the archive entirely.
- This was also the reason why the comic never got an ending as Ian was tired of said complaints. Compounded with his being busy with his animation career and dwindling interest to draw the comic, he ultimately abandoned it and never looked back.
- Andrew Hussie has been known for taking potshots at the sides of the Homestuck fandom he doesn't like, as well as deconstructing Fan Dumb or using different caricatures of internet culture as the base for some of his characters *
for example, both Nepeta and Meulin are cat-themed Shipping fangirls, however, Meulin represents the more loudmouthed of the two whereas Nepeta has had enough Character Development to gain more shades to her character For example, Dirk and Jake were only revealed to have been dating when they were about to break up This reached a climax when Jane engages "trickster mode", a hitherto Easter Egg turned into a power-up like that gives Her, and subsequently the other Alpha cast candy-themed outfits and hyper-sugary personalities *... As well as caucasian skin tone. Beforehand, Hussie had explained that the characters were simply "Aracial", so there was no canon race or skin colors for any of them * Homestuck characters are represented as literal white sprites, with the exception of the gray-skinned trolls , which didn't appease the heated arguments between fans either calling each other out (and Hussie himself) as Racist for refusing to accept characters as anything other than white, or people poking fun at them. At this point, when Jane turns Jake into a trickster, she says that she feels "So very... CAUCASIAN!" followed by an exaggerated Big "NO!" from the latter. Cue the fandom going up in flames over how racist or insensitive the joke is. So much so, in fact, that Hussie edited and redacted the joke for the first time he's ever done so. Cue the fandom going up in flames over either Hussie being "thin-skinned" or the complaining side of the fandom having annoyed Hussie to the point of submission, finally culminating with a response from Hussie's tumblr explaining the situation. Cue the fandom going up in flames over the response, which prompted yet another post in which Hussie responds to some of the controversy regarding the previous post, calling out the people attacking other members of the fandom. These were some of his reactions.
These are just a few, picked out semi-randomly, ranging from “mild, but missing the point” to “unspeakably terrible”.
[...] if you truly dislike censorship, and do not wish to see more self-censorship in the future, then you would be doing your part to behave in a way that doesn’t make creators feel embarrassed to be defended by you.
Web Original
- Ricky Gervais expressly pointed out that they were no longer going to give The Ricky Gervais Show away for a period before charging for it, because they were getting annoyed at fans whining that they had missed out. So they just started charging upfront.
- Super Mario Bros. Z creator Alvin Earthworm was constantly being asked on Newgrounds and on his deviantART account (among others) when the next episode of the series was coming out. The show was something he does as a hobby and (to his own admittance) didn't expect it to take off like it did.
- A similar fate befell Arfenhouse Teh Movie 3; the creator, Misteroo, released two prank films instead of the promised third film because fans would not stop asking him when it would come out. The second of these was released because none of them got the hint.
- Matt Wilson, the creator of Bonus Stage, ended the series and pretty much dropped off the Internet in part due to the fans, who were by turns screamingly negative or creepily obsessed.
- LittleKuriboh had mentioned his bisexuality on his livejournal, and someone who knew him personally took that information to his parents. LK has since stated that he will be much, much more cautious in posting personal information in the future.
- This is often the motivation for uploaders disabling comments on YouTube, far more so than Orwellian Editor reasons. Case in point, WWE's official Youtube Channel. However, knowing the IWC (Internet Wrestling Community), one would only be able to guess how many comments they would receive about Ring of Honor, TNA, Chris Benoit, or the myriad of other "We Do Not Speak Of Such Things" topics that they would undoubtedly be inundated with.
- Sometimes, when a group of videos on YouTube gets DMCA'd, fans of the videos will quite unfairly and needlessly harp on the uploader. In at least one case, this has resulted in the uploader personally taking down the rest of his/her videos.
- Retsupurae used to have a comments section on their channel but removed it after their viewers wouldn't stop either bickering amongst themselves or posting links to videos for the guys to riff on, even after it became apparent that Retsupurae ignored said links. After much clamouring in the videos the comments were reinstated only for the same thing to happen again and this time it seems they're gone for good. The suggestions may have also been partly responsible for the removal of their Formspring, although it may have been a temporary thing in the first place. It did not help that someone posted a fandom secret of pairing the guys up, or the person who uploaded a video consisting of nothing but Slowbeef's laughter strung together for ten minutes, intensely creeping them out.
- As an April Fools' Day prank, Maddox changed The Best Page In The Universe into One of the Better Pages in the Universe. Most of the fans didn't get the joke and thought either it was a serious new direction, he had a girlfriend imposing the changes, or he was hacked. After reviewing the emails he received reacting to the prank, he declared, "I seriously contemplated taking down my site and just posting links to animal porn for you retards. You're all idiots, and I've lost what little respect I had for you."
- A lot of That Guy with the Glasses contributors used to have FAQ threads on the forums where they would answer any question. Not only have those gone because of questions that got too personal, rude or creepy, but most of the people have even fled the place altogether because of the culminating mess of white-knights, stalkers, trolls, sexist homophobes and death threats.
- There was a site-wide Running Gag that everyone wanted Obscurus Lupa and treated her like a Memetic Sex God. It had a lot of funny moments, there was no sexist behavior involved and it produced loads of Fanfic Fuel, but because too many fans took it as permission to just consider her as a hot chick and not a reviewer, it had to die down.
- Another Lupa-related one. Her relationship with her boyfriend Phelous produced lots of videos and a shared fanbase, but due to some people hitting Lupa with accusations of ruining Phelous' work, she says she's become hesitant to make videos with Phelous as a result.
- The Spoony Experiment once spent months campaigning for votes to win "Funniest Person to Follow" at the Mashable Open Web Awards. After some rather nasty comments about his "Thank You" video, he pulled it and replaced it with "An Appeal For Manners". Spoony also publicly called out his fans for making his (now former) fellow TGWTG contributors hesitant in doing crossovers with him since said fans would inevitably cause a ruckus.
- There's also been at least one occasion where fans have shown up unannounced and uninvited in cosplay outside of Spoony's house (and apparently have done the same thing to his parents), and refused to leave until the police showed up. Considering that his brother is a police officer who has had people try murder him Noah was very unamused.
- Furry image board site Fchan had played an April Fools prank on its viewers by making every link always direct to a specific category of images instead of the section people intended to click on. People complained loudly about this, causing the admin to revolt by shutting the site down for a day because, in his own words, "People don't know how to take a joke."
- Rule 34 (the site) also learned this the hard way, after Dreamhost (their old host) forced them to pull Toddlerkon. The following April after they had completed the move to DUTCH servers, they put up one of those stock FBI warnings (which had anyone paid attention to where they moved would have been bloody obviously fake) and claimed lolicon was about to go, which was further helped along by e-hentai REALLY having to do this at coincidentally the same time due to their own hosts, and also the guilty verdicts of the Whorley and Handley cases in real life. The response when the veil was lifted? A hacker taking over the site and replacing everything with pictures of tigers (both tanks and animals), then his penis, and finally 20ish straight days of DDoS which obliterated a server and is partly responsible for why the site runs like crap today. Porn on the internet. Srsbsns. Interestingly, the second April Fool's joke went completely unnoticed due to the furor over the first, with a total of three comments over the following week about it. The second 2010 April Fool's joke? Aliasing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Big_Green_Talking_Turtles, Baxter's infamous line in the first season. Was lampshaded later when the site ran a vote for what missing features from the move were to return. This being the internet, the joke option won, and so everything was turned into Atari Jaguars instead, continuing the big cat theme the troll had started.note In reality, their code was on that dead server, and their coder was chased off during the first April so there was no one to repair them anyway.
- Artists have been known to remove their galleries from art sites due to harassment from fan dumb and other such stuff. Due to some of the troublesome nature, many prefer to remain anonymous or only speak through their friends nowadays. Some examples include:
- Someone opening requests and winding up with people obsessively asking when their requests were done, or winding up with so much they can't do it anymore. Other times, artists have only opened up certain commission slots depending on the comments posted due to "snipers" only to get constantly complained at. Artists have been known to limit commission slots or put restrictions on the content because people would post within ten minutes and buy off most of the slots, etc.
- Seeing their work posted on other sites without their permission, traced, ripped, etc. Sometimes even worse when they got accused of it and got banned by the art thieves because of bribery, nepotism, and corruption on art sites favouring the thieves.
- Het is Ew mentalities. Extreme fans have been known to send hate-mail to creators (even JK Rowling!) because they made a heterosexual pair canon, or drew pictures of hetereosexual couples. This has happened numerous times on deviantART, Sheezyart, and even Fur Affinity. An anime-artist known for drawing Yaoi once decided to draw a picture of her OC making out with an OC of her real life boyfriend. Her fanbase proceeded to flood the comments section saying how disgusting it was and saying she was skimping on them. She proceeded to delete her account because people begun to make misogynistic comments without taking into account that the artist was female in real life.
- There's also one comic that shows the inverse cause, but same result of this trope. An artist in the Furry Fandom (complete with Furry Avatar) posts a picture, asking for comments. One of the comments heaped on the praise, but gave too much information. This shifts the artist out of the furry avatar state, cue a couple of beat panels, and he's trying to get to sleep with "Sweaty with arousal" running in a loop in his head.
- Some artists have been known to close commissions down after people harassed them. Either stuff happened in real life and commissioners harassed them about when their pic would be done, terrible customers would ask them to constantly redo the pic because they messed stuff up, people stiffing payment, etc. Among these "terrible customers" were a real life professional artist (read: Someone who draws art for a living) who had to put stiff requirements on commissions because she had to spend up to $100 in supplies for a troublesome customer only for him to stiff her and cancel the job when it was already done. She put it in her portfolio anyways, but proceeded to see that pic put up in that customers' gallery and treated as a "Request". Another artist reported a troublesome customer asking him to redo the pic numerous times and found every rejected sketch uploaded to that customer's gallery.
- In almost any art web site, artists who grow popular tend to be cautious in revealing their contact and messenger information due to people either trying to mooch off of them for free art or harass them over anything.
- Fan artists have closed their galleries or stopped posting altogether due to offensive comments that fanfiction or fan art is not art and accusations of plagiarism and tracing.
- Many IRC-channels have been removed due to harassment and flame wars. The same applies to websites as well; before Serenes Forest became the new go-to place for Fire Emblem information, other sites had served the purpose and were later shut down because the moderators and administrators got too tired of dealing with the raging Fan Dumb.
- The Tropes Mirror Wiki originally was open for anyone who wanted to sign on and edit. But then a handful of jokers from This Wiki decided the folks over on the Mirror needed to be "punished" for daring to actually exist as a website and started spam-bombing the Mirror by creating new pages that were titled from the old wiki (using actual trope titles of pages that hadn't been imported yet), but filled with porn spam, or ads for erectile dysfunction drugs, or cheap cigarettes, and the like. As a result, new editors have to now be approved by the Admins before they can do anything on the wiki. When one of the spammers was tracked down and confronted, he admitted to doing it as a "Fuck you" to the Mirror on behalf of Fast Eddie and TV Tropes, despite the Mirror's existence not violating any law, rule, regulation, or standard of behavior.
- PostSecret opened an iPhone app at the end of 2011 so people could take photographs and edit them quickly to make their own secrets and send them to a separate secret section that other app users could see. While mostly secrets similar to those found on the website people started to send in generally hurtful secrets, often about other secrets sent through the app. PostSecret is known for sending in the most personal secrets people have so rude comments aren't looked upon kindly. This started a huge fight between those being rude, trolls and those trying to defend those being attacked. Actual secrets got pilled under all of these. The creators tried to set up a system where they would screen every secret sent in, which was at an average of 30,000 per day. This quickly proved impossible and the app was closed on the first day of 2012, lasting a total of four months. A lot of the secrets near the end of the app commented that the app and the "secrets" involved were proof that people really can't govern themselves.
- RubberFruit was one of the most prolific GModders on YouTube, but stopped making videos between December 2011 to July 2012 to show his displeasure towards his subscribers, particularly for constant demands for new videos as well as the habit for fans to spam lines of his works on videos for music he usednote which did lead to a few comments sections of these videos being blocked, notably those being used for Painis Cupcake's background music.
- Video Games Awesome used to have it where anyone could communicate with them in their chat room during their playthroughs, but after one too many instances of trolls spoiling the game for them, they made it so that only donators who contributed at least $50 could participate in the chat, which pissed off some long time fans who couldn't spare the money.
- Totalbiscuit, a person on Youtube known for highly professional video game commentary and being very opinionated, has come under scrutiny multiple times for getting mad at fanboys for being too rabid or too bossy. One of the biggest controversies involving him was when he got mad at a user because they, after telling someone that he doesn't take requests in a completely passive manner (and not rude at all), had told him that he should take requests because he owes it to his fans.
"All fanboys must die."
- Stewart Slade, author of The Salvation War, was planning a third book in the series - a series he'd hoped to publish eventually, once completed. However, one of the fans decided to take the story, put it into a PDF, and add it to a torrent, despite this being clearly against the author's wishes. The end result was that the project became toxic to any potential publishers, and the third book will now never be written.
- Twitch streamer Bwana had enough of the Brain Slug emoticon being synonymous with racist comments*. Not only did he make Twitch change the emoticon to an actual brain slug, he made the old emoticon subscriber only.
- One result of the Seigenthaler incident was the The Other Wiki barred unregistered users (i.e., those with IP addresses only) from starting articles (although they are still free to edit those started by registered users).
- This (and the fact that he doesn't want to be remembered for it, as seen here )is the reason why Mo Bros Studios will no longer do any Spongebob countdown videos.
Western Animation
- Todd Kauffman, character designer/director for Total Drama Island and creator of Sidekick, had a chatbox on his blog which he used to answer questions for his fanbase. Then, despite—or perhaps because of—his warnings not to imitate him or else he would delete the chatbox, a huge ginormous number of impostors went on all at once one day in May 2011. The chatbox was deleted soon after, but he started a new one in early June.
- Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi used to host regular AIM chats with the fandom, and post Q&A sessions on certain Ren and Stimpy message boards. Some chats and question sessions went well, at least at first. However, after a large amount of "heckling" and being drowned out with constant clamoring requests of "Do you like this show? What do you think of this show? What's your opinion on anime?", etc. (Mostly done for the purpose of troll-baiting his opinionated statements against animated shows he doesn't like) and even moderation not helping matters of people getting somewhat out of hand, he dropped this method of communication altogether. However, he later would created his own self-moderated blog to talk about various subjects and drawing and animated character theories, and does participate in comment discussions there. But he has lessened considerably himself from making as many overt statements about cartoons he does not like, quite as much, focusing more of his attention on simply praising the inspirations he does admire.
- The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode The Last Roundup was originally broadcast with a full-fledged appearance by fan-favourite background pony Derpy Hooves, complete with her being referred to by name. Unfortunately, to some people it looked like a mockery of the mentally handicapped (the name "Derpy" is often used to mock mentally handicapped people), so the episode was taken off of iTunes and replaced with a new version, in which Derpy's name is not mentioned, her voice is changednote which was done at the request of the voice actress, Tabitha St. Germaine, since she had gotten Derpy's gender wrong and voiced her as a male character but allowed the original cut to still be broadcast and put on the DVD as she found it entertaining, and her trademark crossed eyes were corrected. Some bronies were not happy. In later episodes Derpy still appears with eyes crossed without incident, although she doesn't speak and is not referred to by any name. But it HAS been confirmed she will speak again and her canon name is offically Derpy Hooves. Her new voice will likely be the one used as a favor to Tabitha.
- Furthermore, the writer for this episode has a mentally disabled child. She was upset when she started getting hate mail, because she hadn't realised that the fan-name Derpy could mean "mentally disabled". It need not be said that she was not happy with her blunder. Though she wasn't behind it, she preferred the second cut of the episode.
- John de Lancie had to shut down production on bonus features for his Bronycon documentary due to rampant piracy.
- Greg Weisman, creator of Gargoyles and The Spectacular Spider Man, ran a blog called "Ask Greg" for years with little to no incident. Fan could ask questions about the kinds of details that never make it into shows (like "What are Gargoyle marriage customs like?"). When he began work on Young Justice, the blog was positively deluged by questions blatantly asking for spoilers from upcoming stories, questioners being incredibly rude or demanding, masking criticisms or flames as questions, duplicate questions etc. This led to a temporary closing of the question form and new rules on what could be asked. Things calmed down, but the March 2012 airing of episodes in Turkey before the U.S. has led to an influx of questions basically asking for summaries of the dialogue in those episodes, so only time will tell how long Ask Greg will remain open.
- As of April 2012, Greg has openly stated he is on the verge of shutting the blog down completely.
- The production crew for The Simpsons now ignore (often justified) complaints of Seasonal Rot because of the picky fans that used to frequent alt.tv.simpsons and nitpick perfectly good episodes.
- Tress MacNeille once had to cancel several convention appearances because of a creepy stalker obsessed with Babs Bunny who sent her several disturbing letters that gave the impression he planned to rape her. This was later parodied in an actual episode where Babs is screaming and running away from a creepy Tiny Toons fan.
- Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko make as few con appearances as possible because their fans have been stalking them and harassing the voice actors about fan shipping. They reject any invitation to a convention other than the San Diego Comic Con due to its high security.
- Ultimate Spider-Man's critical reception eventually resulted in the fanbase attacking the creators and Jeph Loeb. After a certain amount of time, Jeph or Marvel ended up taking down Jeph's Facebook pagenote Later on, there was speculation that wasn't really Jeph's Facebook page, just something an Ultimate Spidey hater made so other people could have a place to vent, and no one's entirely sure what the real story is
- For a short time at the beginning of season 3, Frederator made weekly Adventure Time recaps called "Mathematical" for each episode that would also include themed caller segments. Then, the recap for the episode "What Was Missing" referenced the Marceline/Bubblegum pairing and asked for feedback, causing an explosion of Fan Dumb(from Shipping Wars to general homophobia to shippers calling one of the shows writers a homophobe because he didn't like the recap), to the point where the Mathematical channel was deleted from youtube, along with all the recaps, and Fred Seibert himself posted an apology for all the crazinesss.
- With the revival of Toonami, the crew created a Tumblr to interact and answer fan questions. However, as of April 2013, they disabled the Q&A option due to endless nonsense and people asking the same questions over and over.
- The Family Guy episode "Turban Cowboy" features one scene where Peter drunkenly runs over runners of the Boston Marathon, and another where Peter unknowingly sets off a bomb when he attempts to use a cell phone; the episode aired just a month before the April 2013 bombing at the real Boston Marathon. That Fox responded by pulling the episode from pretty much everywhere it could legally be viewed from in the US was already basically inevitable - that someone else responded by editing the clips together to make it look like Peter bombed the marathon made it a sure deal.
- To put it in perspective, the show's notoriously irreverent creator, Seth MacFarlane, was utterly disgusted by that video remix.
Other
- Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen deleted an entire backlog of stories about one coworker after people ignored his request not to try to guess his identity.
- Some people who upload series to Keep Circulating the Tapes on sites such as YouTube may delete their channels to encourage people to buy the DVD set. Occasionally, they wind up chased off of the site by Fan Dumb who doesn't want to pay for official DVD sets. In particular, one user whose identity shall remain anonymous dedicated a lot of time to keeping the tapes circulated for old shows that had not been given a DVD release. In particular, they uploaded the entire Daria series to their channel and mirror channels, and deleted them when the DVD release finally came around; but then they deleted their accounts after rabid Fan Dumb begun to yell at him for asking them to buy the DVD release and telling others where to find torrents of the series. When s/he shut down their channel, they took a dozen series that never had a DVD-release with them.
- Hotels that are commonly booked for business meetings or conventions have sometimes even turned away congoers/attenders because in the previous year, they trashed rooms, stole things, harassed hotel staff/other guests, or raised ruckuses.
- The YMCA in one state refused to host a Jr. High camping weekend because a group of kids lit a fire in the cabins.
- Other YMCAs have reported similar damages - one in Colorado banned a Jr. High camping weekend from ever being hosted there after a grill went missing from an adjacent campsite and was later discovered inside their swimming pool.
- New Jeresy FurBQ was completely canceled after 2012 when a few people did very lewd things in public, causing the town to not only threaten the people hosting the event with legal action, but cut the budget of their emergency services, which the event was used as a charity to raise money for them.
- Inverted with another Furry convention - the independent security company had actually been caught harassing con-goers and non con-goers.
- The city of Pasadena, California has now refused to allow the the Power Morphicon to be held in their city due to a pie throwing panel held by Paul Schrier and Jason Narvy, better known as Bulk and Skull, netting a whopping 9000 dollars in damages.
- Allegedly, a convention in Las Vegas was banned from Mandalay Bay because hotel staff reported seeing bathroom doors ripped off, shattered mirrors, and entire sets of clothing stuffed down the toilets.
- The same thing frequently happens with music venues. While bands will sometimes get blacklisted from certain venues for things like theft, vandalism, or general bad behavior, fans are frequently the ones who ruin things. Someone gets assaulted/groped in the pit? Moshing gets banned. Underage kids coming into all-ages/18+ shows and getting adults to buy them booze? Age restriction gets changed to a blanket 21+. Fights repeatedly breaking out or people stealing/vandalizing property on a consistent basis at shows of a certain genre? The venue blacklists that entire genre. It goes like this: if a venue that used to be known for shows stops booking bands of a certain genre or stops having them altogether, chances are very good that it's because a select group of assholes ruined it for everyone.
- Guns N' Roses is an infamous example. The reason why they're Persona Non Grata in St. Louis? The concertgoers at their show at the Riverport Amphitheater responded to Axl Rose stopping the show in response to a bootlegging attempt by rioting and causing damage to the venue in the process. That's right, Axl Rose was Mis-blamed for once. And because of that one dumbass would-be pirate, Guns N Roses has been blacklisted by every major venue in the city, and to this day, their music, while still allowed in the city, leaves a bad taste in the mouths of a bunch of people in St. Louis, particularly those who have some connection to Riverport.
- At least one hotel has considered banning Homestuck cosplayers altogether because of the messes that the grey bodypaint on those cosplaying as Trolls causes, including damage to the plumbing and pools and hot tubs that have had to be drained because cosplayers thought that would be a quicker way to get it off.
- Civil servants and government officials frequently feel this way about newspaper columnists and the public. More than one former Treasury official has secretly admitted to deeply hating the media and public, generally because they expect more of the government than it can reasonably provide or because they demand the government direct its money in a certain way without thinking through the consequences.
- Twilight fans actually found a way of inverting this trope. After the stars of the film broke up due to Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson with a married director, Twi-hards flocked to their nearest outlet store in order to hide magazines that detailed the story. Some of them even took pictures of themselves doing it, making this a bizarre case of Why Non-Obsessed People Can't Have Normal Things.
- AMC Theatres has banned people from wearing certain costumes it feels may make others feel uneasy (this may include costumes worn by, among others, Batman, Catwoman, and Bane—in all fairness, a Bane costume would definitely make a fellow moviegoer feel uneasy) in the wake of James Holmes's homicidal rampage at a Cinemark theatre in Colorado. It may not help that Holmes referred to himself as The Joker.
- Artists that showcase their work on sites like Deviant ART and Fur Affinity may open themselves to drawing for other people, whether it is by requests, trades, or commissions. If the fans of the artist go too far with their demands for what they want drawn, the artist may either place extreme restrictions on who can get art from them or they may just outright quit and rip down their entire gallery. Similar results can happen if people outright harass an artist.
- Female bloggers in the atheist/skeptical community have been subject to horrifying amounts of misogyny (including lots and lots and lots of rape threats) over the last couple of years, because of a mistaken impression by some male skeptics that feminists don't want men to have sex or that feminists promote pseudoscience because they see science and/or critical thinking as exclusively male ideas. A couple have temporarily or permanently quit blogging, leading to gloating and further abuse from said male skeptics.
- Stonehenge can no longer be directly accessed by tourists, except under special circumstances, because of the danger that people will chip off pieces as souvenirs.
- Any online forum or message board is bound to fall into this trope when there's a surge of trolling or other nonsense. Used to be able talk about specific topics freely or say certain words without harm? Thanks to a few people going too far, now no one can have that freedom. Used to be able to post files and links to share with members? Now you can't do it anymore thanks to a few members abusing the system. If there's a lot of Fan Dumb or Entitled Bastard within the community, you can expect them to blame the administrators and/or moderators for revoking specific privileges, even if the members are at fault.
TV Tropes
- TV Tropes has a Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement meant to prevent any Flame Wars in This Wiki (read that page for more). Unfortunately in some situations, some tropers completely ignore this rule, leading to the mods locking the page most likely for good...which means nobody gets to add and edit future tropes. A few pages have also been locked to stop persistent vandals who are too savvy to be simply blocked.
- In extreme cases, there's the Permanent Red Link Club, in which the tropes are so misused, become a magnet for racial slurs and personal attacks, and the like that not only the page is locked, the page (and in some occasions, the entire trope) gets deleted, never to be used again. Forever.
- Previously, the only pages that were cut and locked were Permanent Red Link Club members such as I Am Not Making This Up and So Yeah. However, as tropers were continuously attempting to revive redundant and unnecessary tropes placed on the Cut List, nowadays pretty much anything that was cut is now auto-locked. However, unless it's on the Permanent Red Link Club, it can be unlocked if the page can be proven to be useful on YKTTW and the like.
- The trope Please Elaborate was meant to be a handy tool for Tropers. If one found a poor example, but didn't know the source material well enough to expand it themselves, they would add that example to Please Elaborate, and a troper with actual knowledge of said example could fix it. It joined the Permanent Red Link Club when lazy tropers started adding Please Elaborate to their examples pre-emptively to pawn off the actual elaboration of said example to other tropers.
- And in less extreme but still unfortunate cases, Real Life examples can be cut and prohibited from a page if things get controversial enough. On that note, there's also the Example Sectionectomy, for which examples are either cut entirely or relegated to a separate area such as Darth Wiki or the Discussion tab if things get nasty.
- This is the reason why Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales no longer exist in TV Tropes. Some people couldn’t resist putting controversial and creepy content in Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales, which led to these sections being sent off to separate off-site wikis.
- TV Tropes used to have a "strikethrough markup", but it was eventually disabled as people were using it simply to sneak in Take Thats and such. Texts that were previously striked are now hidden texts. The strike format is still usable in the forums, though.
- Headscratchers used to be called "It Just Bugs Me", but was renamed because people kept misinterpreting it as "Why does <insert anything here> suck so much?".
- The Archive of Bellicose Lexicon Entities was a series of articles listing tropers accordingly to their visions on trope naming, images, example lists and the like. However, since it was determined that these articles, rather than serving their purpose as fun places for like-minded tropers to associate, were inspiring antagonism and factionalism among our user base, they have been discontinued and all of them eventually redirect back to that index. Tropers are no longer listed, as they can simply add themselves through their userpages anyway.
- Colored text was removed due to negative use and abuse of hard-to-read colors. Now even the easy-to-read colors like red and blue are forever gone from the site.
- Troper Tales used to be a section where tropers can post personal stories where they relate to specific tropes. The feature was heavily abused by people trying to post more and more ridiculous stories to the point where it was causing problems, so Troper Tales was removed for that and for not adding anything noteworthy to the site.
- Trolls, vandals and sockpuppeteers plurging the site and its articles led to a recreation of the login/handle creation system in spring, replacing the standard sign up theme with a CAPTCHA approval addon.
- Many threads in the forums that contained intelligent discussions get locked when people start and keep trolling, flaming each other, or derailing the topic after being told more than once by the moderators to knock it off, ruining it for everyone else who wished to continue the discussion in a civil manner. While some threads get temporarily locked to let everyone cool off, other threads can get locked forever, never to be reopened unless a mod says otherwise.
|
|
