Misused: Creators Pet

She was basically the center of Carter's arc for those seasons, as far as Character Focus goes.

Now, I'll say this. I stopped watching ER around season 5, but I heard complaints about the arc in general. Not sure if they were directed at her or not.

By contrast, a character I absolutely think needs to go is Johan/Jesse from Yu-Gi-Oh GX. He does have some Marty Stu traits, but here's the thing: the entry itself admits he's very popular. I know for a fact the absolute most popular slash pairing in the fandom, if not the most popular pairing period, is him and the main character. Not a Scrappy.

Sorry for the double post but I've been informed that a number of negative YMMV tropes have been added to The Mighty Thor, including Creator's Pet, without consulting this thread or any other. They all refer to the new, female inheritor of the mantle and are written in a rather spiteful, borderline misogynistic way.

Thoughts?

Well, I'll say this. All the complaints about the Absorbing Man fight? They're... actually spot-on. It's quite Narm-y in a "I am woman, hear me roar" kind of way I don't expect in this day and age.

Definitely overly complain-y, though. And Creator's Pet is definitely wrong.

By the way, I can't help but notice that most of the entries of the Live-Action TV page are female. This rub anyone else the wrong way?

Eh. That might be on writers more than anything.

This example was recently listed:

• Hermione Granger from Harry Potter is sometimes accused of being this in the fan base due to the films (all but the fifth being written by Hermione fanboy Steve Kloves, which is what got him the job in the first place) and later books playing her up as being more useful than Ron Weasley (which for some shippers seriously hurt the credibility of their relationship since it never really looked balanced).

She is quite popular in general I don't think that just a writer being a fan of a character is in any way an example.

edited 24th Feb '15 1:56:59 AM by Memers

Okay, thanks.

Yeah, kill the Hermione example. With fire. She's a protagonist, and she's too popular. I think this is a case of complaining about characters you don't like.

If anything it would be something like adaptation writer version of Author Tract or something like the adaptation writer likes X so they get more screen time, but that is not this trope.

In some variations, that's part of this trope, but not the only part.

I have actually heard people call movie!Hermione this trope, but not book!Hermione. Mostly due to her being more obviously pretty and getting lines that went to other characters in the books, making her seem smarter. There is actually an argument that can be made that Ron was shortchanged at her expense; most of his better scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, and you can see them in the uncut versions that air on TV sometimes, but not the theatrical or DVD versions. These scenes included a major romantic scene between them in the seventh movie.

edited 24th Feb '15 2:35:05 PM by HamburgerTime

That is based on a much broader interpretation of the trope than we use. It is typical for screen adaptations of novels to compress or condense characters in order to avoid confusing the audience with too many people to care about.

Do we have a trope along the lines of Adaptation Focus? The closest I can think of is Ascended Extra, but this is a bit broader.

As I said, those things can contribute, but aren't on their own this trope. But you'd have to make the argument that the changes are made because the character is liked, and not just because it fits the medium better, or other considerations. A little more screentime than the original isn't enough. That's just a comparison. Maybe she just had too little screentime in the source. Or maybe, as mentioned, she just had her scenes cut less than other characters. Giving a character more weight in the narrative compared to the source doesn't count. That means it's a more important character, who deserves more screentime and focus. It needs to be an unreasonable amount of screentime for the story prominence of the character. And it needs to be a favourite character. And she needs to be shilled. And she needs to be hated by the vast majority of fans.

edited 24th Feb '15 2:51:22 PM by AnotherDuck

So I gave the Live-Action TV page a more thorough look, and found pretty much what I was expecting. Most of the characters listed there are female, most of those are love interests, and a good slice of those are specifically replacement love interests; that is, a character brought in as a romantic partner after the other character involved's original relationship ends. Some of the male characters on the page fit this description, as well.

Now, maybe this type of character is just hard to write well, but is it overly cynical of me to suspect sexism and/or shipping may be at play here? At the very least the trend is interesting, no?

Shippers suck, certainly. But as I said, I think a big part of what you're talking about might be on the writers. It's very easy to "oversell" a love interest, and as for sexism - yeah, I bet it's present, but from which end? How many love interests (in the strictest sense, as opposed to two protagonists who get together) are female in the first place?

There's often a big part of Replacement Scrappy in there.

But do they fit the other requirements for Creator's Pet? If not, they can be deleted. Thing is, replacement characters by definition fill the same role as who they replace, so they should have roughly equal importance and screen time. If they have that, they're not examples. It's only when they get a vastly increased screen presence that they can count as Creator's Pet.

I think part of it is that, well, Replacement Scrappy tends to be a Scrappy, and writers try too hard to compensate for that when introducing a new character leading to this.

But please, feel free to cite specific examples. Pointing to the page and bringing up allegations isn't going to get us anywhere, you know?

Courtesy link.

Hello,

I was pointed to this thread to help clean up the mess that is the Creator's Pet section. I have already nuke on entry in the Anime/Manga section and you can read my edit reasons in the History.

Anyway, the primary reason that I am here is because I think all of the Pokemon entires in the Anime/Manga section does not fit the requirement for creator's pet. These are the examples as follows.

• May's Squirtle in the Battle Frontier arc had elements of this as well. Despite being an untrained baby, it knew moves that it shouldn't, won battles that it shouldn't, and stole screentime away from all of her other Pokemon. And among long-time viewers, it certainly didn't help that Ash used to have a Squirtle of his own, except his wasn't a Marty Stu and had a much more interesting personality.
• Trainer wise, Paul is seen as this to being a Base Breaker and for good reasons. This status is mainly obtained because the writer of the Sinnoh arc stated he was his favorite character and as a result, Paul got away with everything from arguably abusing his Pokemon, to showing poor sportsmanship and doing psychological damage to some trainers on the way that rendered the trainer unable to battle for a certain amount of episodes (Maylene and Ash). He's also praised by characters (Cynthia being the most notorious example) with high strength and is told that he has a different training method instead of calling him out on being an abusive trainer.
• Paul was also what brought on another Creator's Pet: the Chimchar he previously owned. Due to Ash and Paul being rivals, Chimchar was what really connected the two; Paul being who released Chimchar and Ash taking him in. It was sure to be a major storyline seen throughout Sinnoh, and Chimchar was indeed well-liked at first as people enjoyed watching him grow as a strong member of Ash's team against what Paul wanted him to be originally; even evolving to his final stage, Infernape. The problem is his screentime was too much and he became an eyesore to watch as he went on to continuously beat 2 Pokemon against each of the remaining 4 Gym Leaders and defeating 3 of Paul's 6 Pokemon in their league match. The rest of Ash's Sinnoh team suffered both in characterization opportunities and in battle. The best example of this consequence is Turtwig: After having a good showing in his baseform, he only beat one Gym Leader's Pokemon note as a Grotle and got endlessly curbstomped as a Torterra outside of Team Rocket skirmishes.
• Cilan has been viewed as one by some fans as well. His talents are extremely numerous, his flaws are played almost exclusively for laughs, and he gets new talents and/or flaws to be convenient for the situation in the episode.

The first example, Squirtle cannot be a creator's pet since Squirtle is a popular First Gen starter, therefor not The Scrappy, and is May's primary Pokemon much like Ash's Pikachu. Since he is her main pokemon, of course he will get more screen time than other pokemon.

Paul is horrible example. Base Breaker is not the same as the The Scrappy. He also did not steal screen time for no reason since he was the rival for that season, so of course he would be seen a lot when he was around. And for the record, being a jerk and getting away with it isn't part of being a creator's pet and shouldn't even be there.

Chimchar and his evolution family, was and is still, very popular. In fact, he was the most popular starter pokemon of his generation. And, as the poster themselves noted, ' Due to Ash and Paul being rivals, Chimchar was what really connected the two; Paul being who released Chimchar and Ash taking him in. It was sure to be a major storyline seen throughout Sinnoh'. Since his story arc was big part of that season and connected directly to the rival, he didn't steal time for others for no reason.

Finally, Cilan was one of the three main characters of that season along with Ash and Iris, so he is automatically taking off the list.

And most of all, other than Paul, no other character fills the Creator's Favorite. All the Pokemon mentioned are fan favorite, which is why they got a lot of exposer and Cilan sounds like a comedian character that some people didn't like.

Sorry for the long post.

edited 14th Mar '15 8:22:45 AM by Ramona122003

I would also like to add that the Naruto section is terrible too and reads more like a complaint thread. Most of the examples are Base Breakers, but not The Scrappy. Also, none of them took unnecessary screen time since they were the villains moving the plot, one being a secondary main character.

There's no need to apologise for a well-written post. The reasoning holds up, and I don't see how any of them fit the trope.

Speaking of giant Wall of Text entries, the entry for the controversial comic series Avengers Arena is even bigger than the Pokemon one, and includes at least half the main characters. This certainly seems dubious, yes? I can't really comment as I haven't read it myself, but I know there's at least one person on these forums who's a really big fan of the book and knows a lot about the fan reaction to it. Should I drop him a line to come down here?