Note: This article lists examples which take place within fandoms; not the TV Trope's opinion as to whether a change is for the worse. TV Trope doesn't have opinions. The focus is on over-reaction about minor changes.
- The Warrior Cats series gets hit hard by this and It's the Same, Now It Sucks! due to
Fan Dumb. The fanbase can't decide whether things should take a totally different route or revert back to what it was like in the first series. It's not that they can't decide so much as they will freely use both tropes depending on what plot development they're talking about. - Ranger Rick (a nature magazine published by the National Wildlife Federation) has had several redesigns due to different artists, and presumably a desire to update with the times. It started out rustic, then became more modern, then simplified for a look more appropriate of a comic book, then made the jump to 3D. The switch from the beautiful modern look of the '80s and '90s to the comic-book look in the early 2000s is a popular choice for when it all went wrong.
- Sweet Valley High had a revival of the original series in 2008. They incorporated modern things in the stories like the Internet and cell phones which weren't commonplace when the series began in 1983. They also updated the teen slang and changed a lot of the iconic Sweet Valley landmarks. Many SVH characters received makeovers: most notably, the Wakefield twins shrank to a size 4. The changes didn't attract new readers and it turned off the original fans, prompting the publisher, Random House, to cease publication of the "new" books after book #6.
- There is an uproar over the retranslation of The Bible into more modern English, with many stating that the "only true translation" is the one done in 1611.
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: They replaced
the Stephen Gammell art with new art by Brett Helquist. The books with the original illustrations have been discontinued by their publishers and online prices are being inflated by the negative response to the newer versions. - The 1997 edition of the venerable cookbook The Joy of Cooking received a major revamp supervised partly by the original author (Irma Rombauer)'s grandson. The tone shift (in particular, dropping Rombauer's first-person conversational narration) was disliked by many.
- Many V. C. Andrews fans were disappointed when the publisher stopped doing the 'stepback'/'keyhole' covers. Same when the ghostwriter strayed from the five book family saga formula with the Orphans miniseries.
In-universe:
- In-universe in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A priest at school tells Stephen Dedalus and some other students that he thought Victor Hugo's work after he broke with the Church to be not half as good. (The joke here, which is easily lost today, is that Hugo broke with the Church very early in his career. This is akin to saying that The Beatles went downhill sometime after, say, Beatles For Sale.)
- A workplace management book about this phenomenon exists called Who Moved My Cheese? about some mice and some "littlepeople" who live in a maze and seek out and find cheese to eat. One group looks for new cheese every time their stash is "moved",note while the other group just complains. Guess which does better? The implications of the book, as some have noted, is change for change's sake is good. If you leave the cheese in one place, it's easier to find, and the mice don't have to spend time looking for it before they can eat. Other authors wrote unofficial sequels with various aspects of the implications in mind: two titled Who Cut the Cheese?, one Who Stole My Cheese? about the financial scandals of the Turn of the Millennium, and finally I Moved Your Cheese 2011 about how the mice end up controlling those outside the maze.
- Quidditch Through the Ages describes how a couple of rule changes within the game of Quidditch in the 19th Century were initially not well-received by the wizarding community:
- In 1883, the goal baskets which had been used for centuries were replaced by the goal hoops used in the modern game. The reason given was that teams were using baskets of different sizes to give themselves an unfair advantage over the opposition, so the decision was made to use hoops instead and to standardise their size. This led to claims that Quidditch wouldn't be the same without the baskets and a number of fans demanded that the baskets be brought back, with one wizard saying "'Alf t' fun's gone" because it was no longer possible to set the baskets on fire "for a laugh".
- The following year, the practice of "Stooging" note was outlawed because of the injuries it was causing and only the player who had the Quaffle in their possession was allowed to enter the scoring area. As reported in The Daily Prophet, this decision caused a riot and one young wizard said he no longer wanted to attend Quidditch matches because of it.
