The Scrappy Cleanup

Could somebody please check out Fire Emblem Fates? There's a bit of craziness going on with the Scrappy examples, and some of them seem quite questionable. At least one is also listed as a Base Breaker on the Broken Base page for that game, and another feels much more like the troper's personal gripes with the character. Haven't played the game, but I'm familiar with it via Let's Plays and I have a vague idea of what the fandom is like from the "Know Your Meme" website.

EDIT: One of the above mentioned examples is actually more neutral-sounding than I thought (maybe it was rewritten?). There's still another one that's rather complainy, though.

edited 27th Feb '16 11:11:08 AM by katethegr8

If it's just about the tone of the example, you can edit it and remove the complainy bits. Most of the time those are just Word Cruft like, "...and even worse..." or other bogus intensifiers.

If someone's listed as Base Breaker, you can probably delete it from The Scrappy with that reasoning, or if you're unsure you can bring the specific example here. I'm not familiar with the franchise or fanbase, though.

edited 27th Feb '16 11:23:00 AM by AnotherDuck

Sounds like the right thing to do, but I don't have enough familiarity with the game's fandom to do much.

EDIT: On that note, the child characters in that game as a whole are listed as Scrappies. I'm starting to wonder how on Earth entire groups of characters can be considered The Scrappy. Complete Monster has a "no groups" policy; I'm wondering if The Scrappy should have the same, since it's more likely than not that there will always be at least one member of that group who has a significant fanbase. The example I mentioned even states that some of the characters have fanbases.

edited 27th Feb '16 12:02:20 PM by katethegr8

Seconded. There is no transitionary phase for The Scrappy. He is or isn't. Weasel Words have no place in a trope like this.

I know that it was a really long time ago, but was a decision ever reached on Ronald Shiner from [1]?

Could we add Claire, from Questionable Content? Mostly because of her sock puppet tendencies; to date, I'm not sure if she's done *anything* other than say things that Jeph Jacques wants to tell the audience. And she's never, ever wrong. Recent pages are literally just her doing a 'this is John Galt' at the 'other characters'(read: audience).

It's certainly not intentional, but she's extremely irritating.

And that's what pretty much the entire fandom thinks of her?

The primary debate seems to be between The Scrappy and Some Anvils Need to be Dropped.

A good example of general feelings towards her I found on Reddit, in reference to Comic # 3188:

/u/heff17: "As somebody who loves Pintsize and has a really hard time liking Claire, having Jeph use Claire to either shit on and/or neutralize Pintsize all the time is getting on the nerves. I'm all for a good rivalry (hell, the comic with them, Faye, and the bird seed was great), but Claire's interactions with Pintsize has always seen her come out on top for terrible reasons. Pintsize used to be such a great character, now he is seemingly only trudged out to make Claire look good. I want Pintsize to at least like draw a dick on her face while she's asleep or something. Wait, strike that, we'd get a week of fallout afterwards. Nevermind."

It's not enough that there are some people who don't like the character. It needs to be the most prevailing opinion of the entire fandom.

Hey, I was looking through the site, and I discovered that the Rockers, Rock and Spud, from [1] are currently listed as both Scrappies and Ensemble Darkhorses.

I think that the reason for this is because the Rockers spent the first few episodes at the bottom of the standings and had very little screentime, making them look like pointless Elimination Houdinis that were just taking up space. However, they got a spike in popularity once they started getting some focus, thanks to Rock's Determinator attitude and Spud's comic relief moments. By the end of the season, most of the reviews I read from fans seemed to view them as a good team that deserved more focus, and suffered from being shoved into the background in most episodes.

So yeah, how does everyone think we should deal with this?

I would say remove them from The Scrappy and keep them on Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. Ensemble Dark Horse I'm not sure about. Well, I haven't a clue about any of the characters or fandom, but from what I read on the page that seems about appropriate.

edited 30th Mar '16 1:58:47 PM by AnotherDuck

Isn't being a scrappy required to be rescued from it, though?

General question, not familiar with the work in question.

I'm not really fond of listing characters who were only hated at one particular point in time mid-work. I've read too many examples where a character does one thing, and instantly becomes a scrappy, and then does another thing and is forgiven again, and then have it repeat.

Sounds like either misuse or perhaps there needs to be some kind of Scrappy Cycle trope.

What do you guys consider a petty or shallow reason for hating a character? Just curious.

Whether a reason is petty or shallow isn't relevant for being The Scrappy.

I don't think Solstice Prince is talking about the trope, just asking for our opinion on something for fun.

So talking about something that isn't the topic of the thread?

I have two things I would like to bring up involving James Bond. One example that should probably be cut, and one possible candidate.

First off, the YMMV for The World Is Not Enough lists Bond's BMW as a Scrappy for some strange reason. It doesn't say anything about fan reaction to it, only describing a couple of misfortunes that befell it over the course of the series. This seems like a pretty big case of a misused trope here.

Also, would the incarnation of Alec Trevelyan from the GoldenEye (1997) video game count as a scrappy? His movie counterpart is listed on the film's page as an Ensemble Dark Horse, but I've heard absolutely nothing but hate for his boss fight at the end of the game. I've seen multiple videos on You Tube calling him one of the worst bosses in video game history.

Yeah, first one doesn't count.

As for him, I don't think it's so much that he's hated as a character, as much as it's his fight that's hated.

An entry in TheScrappy.Advertising has this:

• Cell-phone ringtone company Jamster, for foisting the horrible creature known as "Crazy Frog" on the world. Their ads were practically all over syndicated television in the mid-2000s. "Axel F" by Harold Faltermeyer was never the same again.

It's talking about an entire company being Scrappy, which is not allowed since it violates the NRLEP rule. I suppose it could be re-worded to just refer to the mascot, but I don't remember it being that hated (the frog is actually pretty popular in my middle school).

edited 23rd Apr '16 9:11:39 PM by Adept

I remember some differing opinions about the frog, but nothing overwhelmingly negative fitting The Scrappy.

If it's an entire company, even if we did allow those to count as examples, they'd still be automatically disqualified if they were even remotely successful, as that would by itself speak against them being The Scrappy.

In other words, it fails as an example on multiple points.

Alright. The entry is removed

Bond's BMW has been removed.

A lot of these from Fire Emblem Fates seem to be questionable or shoehorns. Iago and Hans in particular are clearly Hate Sinks due to being villains, so I doubt they qualify. The the kids only seem to be mentioned as an excuse to complain about the method of their inclusion, as otherwise they don't seem to have universal hatred from what I've seen (except maybe Rhajat).

(I understand there's some Natter here, but I'm not in the mood to edit this stuff right now.)

• Hayato. While some fans like him for being voiced by VALSHE for the Japanese version, and Ben Diskin for the English version, others are annoyed at how he's basically a carbon copy of Ricken, except with an absolutely insufferable amount of arrogance. The fact that he fathers Rhajat (as seen below) adds no points to his favor. In polls about which male is to die alone ^note there aren't enough women for a male Avatar and every first-gen male to get married, so unless the male avatar marries Flora, Scarlett, Reina or Anna, someone has to be left out, he's almost always at the top of the list.
• The child characters. While some of them do have fanbases (like Soleil, Midori, Forrest or Kiragi), many people found the implementation was terrible (see Fan-Disliked Explanation), they were completely pointless to the story and that overall, many were underwritten to the point where fans lacked motivation to try them out. It doesn't help that, due to a change in design, it's extremely difficult to get all of them in a single playthrough. It's especially telling when compared to Awakening, as there were three children of each gender in the top ten in that game—here, only Nina got into the top ten, and just barely at tenth place (though Forrest came close at number eleven).
  • Rhajat gets the most hate from quite a bit of the Western fanbase (particularly lesbian players). Being an Expy and implied p/reincarnation of the widely-divisive Tharja and the only female Bi Option was enough to send her to Base Breaker territory, but when the localization played up her stalker traits and toned down her sympathetic ones (mostly in the Avatar supports), she shot straight to this. It doesn't help that she's a child unit to boot, which many are opposed to pairing with on principle, or that the fandom "remembers" the Avatar Support deals FAR more than the rest of her supports, which keep at very least the core of her sympathetic sides.
  • Compared to Morgan in Awakening, Kana gets a lot of dislike, with both genders ranking near the botton of Japanese polls. Reasons include having almost zero plot relevance despite being the child of the main character and another First Dragon ancestor, being a bit of a Flat Character with little personality beyond "a cute kid" (while Morgan was either an amusing Troll [Female] or a sweet Nice Guy [Male]), having some fairly bland parent-child supports (a Female Avatar gets the generic mother support chain with Male Kana, despite being the game's protagonist, which is a particular sore point) looking far too young to be on a battlefield and being generally less useful in gameplay than Morgan was, not having access to all classes immidiately. The localization exasperated this by turning most of their romantic supports platonic, removing a lot of development, especially for Male Kana who got severe Yank the Dog's Chain treatment in most of his and became the game's romantic Butt-Monkey.
• Yukimura gets a fair amount of dislike thanks to being bland and refusing to join in Revelation for rather poor reasons, preventing him from getting further Character Development. Not helping his case is the fact that he has very little impact in all three stories despite his relative importance as Mikoto's retainer and, in effect, being the technical leader of Hoshido while Ryoma is out fighting. In the official poll, he got dead last.
• Queen Mikoto is disliked due to being unrealistically pure, to the point of creating a magical barrier that makes Hoshido's enemies non-violent. She thus comes under a lot of criticism for being a prime factor in the Black-and-White Morality of Hoshido vs Nohr, and the Story Branch Favoritism. Her death having barely any impact on the player due to a case of We Hardly Knew Ye is something else the fandom has a problem with. Azurrin fans also resent her for being the one to drop the Kissing Cousins reveal on them, completely out of nowhere.
• Garon, Iago and Hans are widely loathed for being flat, one-dimensional Saturday morning cartoon villains. Garon in particular gets a lot of vitriol for the same reason as Mikoto—he massively contributes to the Black-and-White Morality. In fact, nearly all the criticisms fans have of the Conquest story are caused by his being Obviously Evil with almost no shades to him. For one, if he were a Well-Intentioned Extremist along the lines of Travant rather than an evil slime monster, or if he at least put in the effort to act like one some of the time, then the Nohrian siblings, the Avatar, and Azura would all have good reasons to follow him and wouldn't be forced to constantly hold an Idiot Ball just to keep the plot moving.
  • It's especially unfortunate as the real Garon is mentioned multiple times by other characters (especially Xander) to have been a good leader and father, which has earned him a fair amount of fan art. That's right, a character the player never meets has more fans than the primary villain.

edited 1st May '16 6:28:14 PM by Karxrida