Overshadowed by Controversy

"Hounddog: Don't remember it by title? Don't worry, neither did we, and now the Cracked IT guys are asking why we have 'Dakota Fanning rape' in our Google cache."

— Cracked.com, 5 Ways Hollywood Tricks You Into Seeing Bad Movies

There are some well-known works that gathered controversy over the years, and there are also famously controversial works in which the controversy, justified or not, would overshadow most other aspects. Which isn't to say that works in the latter category have no other redeeming factor, just that most people would know little else aside from the controversial aspects.

This is not just something controversial, but when the controversy is about a small part of the work or something out of work, thus overshadowing its actual merits. It does not count if every aspect is controversial as that leaves nothing to overshadow, or if the moment was intended to be controversial or be a major part of the work, as that would make it a legit merit as opposed to overshadowing. For example, the ending is such a big and key part of the work that such overshadowing controversy over it goes under its sub-trope Audience-Alienating Ending.

Bad reviews alone do not make a controversial moment, and in fact some works can be well-regarded by critics and those who watched, read, or played the work, and not all of the works listed here are either laughably bad or straight-up abominable. Plot-related twists are generally not what makes up the category either, even if such cases are subjective — if a plot twist qualifies, it is usually an extremely major twist that dramatically changes the story and greatly polarizes or alienates the fanbase. The major qualifier is that the works would be known beyond the fans of a particular genre that there's little knowledge of some other parts of a work to the general public.

Common sources of this include...

• From the work itself:
  • The work contains shocking, offensive, or obscene material such as graphic violence or sexual content, that serves no purpose to the story other than to be shocking, offensive, or provocative for the sake of it, drawing the ire of the Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs in the process, be they politicians or groups^note Works that use such material for reasons beyond superficial shock value or Sex Sells e.g. a work with graphic violence that tells a story about the horrors of war, are usually able to co-exist with controversy on their own merits, unless the content is used in a manner that is so disrespectfully lurid, titillating, or gratuitous that an average audience member would call bullshit on that defence.
  • Unfortunate Implications and/or Values Dissonance that are serious enough to keep audiences from enjoying the work overall.
  • Deceptive, offensive, or patronizing marketing, especially AstroTurfing or particularly bad examples of Totally Radical.
  • Adaptation Deviation. For example, the differences between the book and The Film of the Book.
  • Porting Disasters, especially when it is clearly due to someone not giving a shit or farming it out to the cheapest developer willing to do it.
  • Intrusive microtransactions, especially freemium setups or pay-to-win, especially when they slowly creep into games that originally did a good job at keeping them non-intrusive, when they're sneaked in post-launch via an update in a way that indicates they were deliberately withheld at launch only to bypass attention from the press until the reviews move on to the next game, or when they involve lootbox/gacha setups.
  • Intrusive Digital Rights Management systems, especially always-online requirements or setups that (ironically) create massive security holes.
  • A game ships out in a clearly unfinished or barebones state, usually with numerous Game-Breaking Bugs and day-one patches to fix them, as well as DLC that is quite clearly content that was meant for the launch product that didn't make the cut (especially if it is paid DLC).
  • Pervasive balance issues, especially when they clearly overbuff popular characters, throw unnecessary buffs at characters who have expensive new skins coming out, or habitually release new characters in a blatantly overpowered state.
  • Removal of previously existing features or content from a game, app, or online service.
  • Badly-handled updates, particularly if they create Game-Breaking Bugs, massively unbalance a game or arbitrarily shift power with no regard for the established meta, force gameplay to revolve around gimmicks, or either ignore player input completely or overwhelmingly cater to a specific section of the playerbase.
  • A particularly Harsher in Hindsight moment.
  • Bowdlerization of a work.
  • Someone makes a joke or remark that's meant to be funny or edgy, but it comes across as offensive instead.
  • Changes to the work that don't sit well with the audience.
  • Actual or perceived cultural appropriation.
  • A character is given a Race Lift which the audience does not approve of, especially if done in an overly performative, patronizing, or tokenizing manner, or if it involves heavy whitewashing.
  • A work with a hardcore cult or Geek following becomes mainstream, and as such tries to cater to that more mainstream audience instead of the original fandom.
  • The work tries to comment on social issues or current events, but does so in a clunky, Narmish, performative, or tone-deaf way.
  • The work pokes fun at religion, or something else that many people consider to be Serious Business or a Sacred Cow.
  • A work that is satirical in nature is taken at face value — whether it didn't occur to the writers that a few people might miss the irony, or the work's presentation makes it difficult to figure out if it is meant to be taken seriously or not — especially if the work satirizes a controversial social movement e.g. white supremacists, and ends up being praised as "advocating" their beliefs by the very people it was intended to make fun of.
  • A work that is satirical in nature is done in an extremely clumsy and ill-conceived manner rife with Unfortunate Implications, so that even those who realize it is not meant to be taken seriously still don't enjoy it because it simply isn't funny.
  • A Cultural Translation that comes off as more of a Macekre.
  • A work that may have been well-received at the time it was released hasn't aged well, and instead becomes dated and/or offensive.
  • A work becomes widely derided for having an incredibly off-putting premise.
  • The work is based on a Real Life historical figure or event, but treats that figure/event in a way that is viewed as disrespectful and/or offensive, particularly if it involves whitewashing or outright justifying atrocities, greatly misrepresents an extremely controversial event (especially if it attempts a "both sides" treatment of events where one side is commonly agreed to have been much worse, or pulls a Historical Villain Upgrade or Downgrade under the same circumstances), turns a grave historical tragedy or injustice into a Glurge-y morality tale, or has a (real or perceived) heavily nationalistic or fringe slant.
  • The work plagiarises content from another creator's work without their permission.
  • An independent service is acquired by a much larger entity, especially when that entity begins making sweeping changes to the service that are widely agreed to be for the worse, or outright guts the service.
• From the work's creators:
  • Public catfights between the creator and the media, critics, public, or all three (such as Dear Negative Reader rants).
  • Frequent displays of offensive, embarrassing, or questionable behavior. This includes public intoxication, impulsive offensive comments, vulgarity, and rudeness, political extremism, sexual harassment, etc., especially if said behavior contradicts themes in their own work.
  • Habitual poor showings on social media.
  • Habitual blame games and Never My Fault whenever an aspect of a work receives a negative reception, especially when a creator attacks fans for not accepting it (especially when Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things is invoked for situations where the backlash is completely understandable) or blame some sort of conspiracy to undermine them when all the evidence points to the fault being theirs and theirs alone.
  • Someone involved with the work is the perpetrator of a violent crime (such as rape or murder).
  • Someone involved with the work holds a view that is taboo in mainstream society (e.g. support for racial supremacy, sympathizing with perpetrators over victims in domestic/sexual violence cases, or anti-LGBTQ beliefs), or unintentionally makes a comment that implies holding such views.
  • A creator has financially predatory or exploitative practices towards other creators in the work.
  • Someone overseeing a large group of creators fails to act on or enables serious misconduct from one or more of them.
  • A group of creators becomes notorious for constant infighting and drama.
  • A creator defends or continues to work or associate with someone credibly accused of serious misconduct.
  • Troubled Production stories that become more interesting than the finished product, especially if the finished product disappoints.
  • Abusive or exploitative work environments.
  • Overly-intrusive Executive Meddling.
  • Someone involved with the work has attracted controversy for violating Contractual Purity.
  • The creator makes promise after promise that they fail to keep or botch the delivery of, especially if they fail to take responsibility for dropping the ball and/or blame someone else (especially if they blame fans for taking issue).
  • A work has a creator who has some highly questionable views that people were originally able to separate from the work, but eventually spur people to examine the work more closely, which reveals a lot of previously undetected Unfortunate Implications or outright dogwhistles.
  • Cynical, insincere, patronizing, or self-serving attempts to co-opt political or social causes, particularly as a cheap attention grab or a ploy to throw off bad press.
  • Mass recasts, especially abrupt ones.
  • Production missing previously-stated deadlines for release, especially if said release has been heavily hyped or anticipated, or a delay is announced shortly before release. Sometimes delays add up so it seems it will never get released. This is particularly egregious if the final product winds up being of poor quality, especially if it is overly slapdash or was clearly stitched together from various iterations.
  • Badly-managed crowdfunding efforts, especially when creators make lots of empty promises, fail to deliver perks, botch the release (especially if the retail launch goes fine, but the backer launch doesn't), or engage in serious financial mismanagement or outright fraud.
  • Filing Frivolous Lawsuits intended to financially harass people who criticize the work rather than to protect intellectual property.
  • Unethical behavior by the production company or the company owning the rights to a work, whether or not it's related to the work itself, or ownership/partial ownership by someone unsavory.
  • Purchase of an independent production company by a company known for unethical behavior.
• From critical reception of the work:
  • A work that attracts a following, most likely misaimed, amongst people who are part of a hate group.
  • A work is cited as an inspiration for a violent incident^note It should be noted that research has proved that people who decide it's a good idea to engage in violent activity after being inspired by a work are already mentally unstable. For example, Doom (among other works, like The Basketball Diaries) was blamed by Moral Guardians for the Columbine High School massacre, but the FBI concluded that co-conspirators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were motivated by sadism and revenge, respectively.
  • A work is cited as an inspiration for a dangerous stunt that results in serious injuries and/or death^note usually performed by young people who didn't realise that doing the same thing in real life might not be a good idea.
  • A work's fanbase becomes infamous for a significant Vocal Minority of overzealous fans who engage in hostile confrontations and death threats towards haters, other fans, and even the work's creators who disagree with them, overshadowing the more sensible fans (of which there tends to be more of) and putting outsiders off of the work who don't want to associate themselves with the toxicity. This goes quadruple if the creator encourages these tendencies and uses them as a personal army or goon squad.
  • Contentious and polarizing reviews of highly-anticipated works.
  • It got panned by an influential critic who didn't like it, found it distasteful, or just had a bad day.
  • A work, episode, scene, etc. receives a severe and widespread negative reception on the Internet.
  • A work wins an award, beating another work that was perceived as more deserving by the audience, seemingly due to biases on the judges' part.
  • Review bribery and payola scandals, especially when they lead to dismissals due to a reviewer's refusal to participate in them.

See also Colbert Bump, Dancing Bear, Just Here for Godzilla, Even Nerds Have Standards, Mainstream Obscurity, Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, Watch It for the Meme, Ruined FOREVER, Contractual Purity, Music Is Politics, Yoko Oh No, Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, Audience-Alienating Premise, Audience-Alienating Ending, Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things, Misaimed Fandom, Serious Business, Poe's Law, Jumping the Shark, Tainted by the Preview, Role-Ending Misdemeanor, and Best Known for the Fanservice.

Compare and contrast No Such Thing as Bad Publicity (when a certain work remains popular despite the protests from Moral Guardians and other controversies or even becomes popular because of said controversies), Controversy-Proof Image (when a person is popular and still has a positive reputation despite their controversy), Vindicated by History (when a work which wasn't popular in the past/since the release becomes more liked over time), Condemned by History (when a work which was very popular in the past/since the release becomes more disliked over time), The New Rock & Roll (when a whole genre gets held under controversy), Bile Fascination (when an audience is drawn towards a work specifically because of their curiosity about the uproar surrounding it, which may overlap with this trope), and Walking Spoiler (an In-Universe form of this trope, when a specific character or object is deeply associated with an important plot point within a work that makes it very difficult to talk about them without mentioning their contribution to the plot).

Keep in mind that, despite how it is usually used, "controversial" is not the same thing as "offensive." You can have a completely family-friendly and non-political work that still provokes dissent, especially if the work is aiming for realism. Additionally, since most scandals and controversies tend to not overshadow a work in the long run, only add examples if the controversy in question is still the main point of discussion about a work after at least six months to be absolutely safe. Finally, don't use this page to complain about shows or creators you don't like.

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Examples with their own pages WARNING: Some pages contain unmarked spoilers:

• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Film — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Professional Wrestling
• Sports
• Video Games
• Web Original
  • Channel Awesome
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other examples:

Advertising

• In 2013, Cheerios released an ad that featured an interracial family. Unfortunately, the ad became less known for its content and more known for the racist comments it received.
• One ad from Coca-Cola simply featured the famous "America the Beautiful" being sung by several people of various ethnicities and walks of life, some of whom sang it in different languages. Many people were outraged at the song being sung in anything but English, as well as offending those on the hard right who condemned it as "liberal propaganda" for showcasing the cultural and ethnic diversity of America^note (including some who believed that Coke showing a Mexican-American in the commercial was them promoting illegal immigration) and issued a boycott online. This only allowed the ad to become more memorable; since the initial 2014 airing, Coke has re-aired the commercial during major American events and holidays as a sign of unity.
• Discussions of the marketing for The Emoji Movie will almost inevitably gravitate towards an infamous promotional tweet that parodied The Handmaid's Tale, a TV show about sexual slavery. Needless to say, referencing something like that while trying to advertise a movie for children provoked significant ire.
• The Hitman: Absolution trailer "Attack of the Saints" quickly became known for the eponymous Saints, an all-female enemy faction dressed as Naughty Nuns, being killed by Agent 47. The trailer swiftly earned IO Interactive accusations of sexism, not helped by the fact the trailer was released in the wake of the Depression Quest controversy, which prompted heavy debate about sexualized depictions of female characters in video games.
• Just For Feet was a growing shoe retailer who distinguished themselves with basketball courts inside stores, an in-store snack bar, in-store appearances by professional athletes, and a large clearance section among others. Nowadays, however, they are known for being taken down by a Super Bowl commercial accused of being racist and insensitive.^note It features a barefoot runner in the Kenyan desert being hunted by a Humvee of white men, who is drugged and wakes up to discover he has shoes on his feet, which visibly horrifies him. The ad, alongside accusations of accounting fraud, helped bankrupt the company, which collapsed not too long afterward, and it's all that they're known for now. See it here.
• McDonald's:
  • This upbeat advertisement from when they used the "We love to see you smile" slogan is pretty unremarkable and would be almost completely forgotten today... except that it was the last commercial shown before Today announced the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
  • McDonalds's former mascot "Mac Tonight" has become better known today for the unofficial parody of the character known as "Moon Man", which depicts him as an advocate for white supremacy and bigotry to the point that the meme was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, a far cry from the original Bobby Darin-impersonating moon in TV spots from The '80s.
• Texas mattress chain Miracle Mattress is nowadays better known for the 9/11 sale commercial that killed their business than anything else they've done. The commercial, depicting the chain owner's daughter accidentally knocking over two men who crash into two tall stacks of mattresses, went viral and got major backlash over its poor taste. A few days after pleas from the company stating it wasn't their intention to offend,^note The owner of the company had no idea the commercial was made. the company announced its stores were closing down. A few days later, it was announced they would reopen their stores under new employees and management.
• In March 2020, Marvel released a trailer for a reboot of the New Warriors series as part of Outlawed. The trailer quickly became infamous for two of the superheroes depicted, the non-binary Snowflake and their twin brother Safespace, whose namesakes and powers were based on terms often used to insult the LGBT community. The criticism was enough for Marvel to silently cancel the series, as the series wasn't out by its October release date.
• This French Orangina ad. It barely raised an issue in France, but when a few activists showed it to the U.S., people were so shocked by all the YIFF they saw that one of the later Orangina ads poked fun at it.
• In 2017, Pepsi released an ad starring Kendall Jenner where during a photo shoot, she decides to hand a Pepsi to a cop during the middle of a protest. The ad was heavily panned for being tone deaf and promoting the message that Pepsi would ease tensions between protesting factions. Pepsi would eventually pull it due to the backlash.
• While Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was well-received upon release, it's hard to talk about the movie's advertising without bringing up Sonic's original model◊. Needless to say, people didn't particularly like it when it was first shown off in the trailers. The backlash was so big that the movie got delayed by three months just to redesign Sonic's model to be more on-brand◊.
• For most of the Turn of the Millennium, Jared Fogle was known by virtually everyone as "the Subway guy", as he appeared in many of Subway's commercials as their spokesperson (and was famous enough from that to cameo in movies like Jack and Jill and two of the Sharknado flicks). Nowadays, however, he is more known for his arrest in 2015 where he ultimately pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and traveling to pay for sex with minors.

Anime and Manga

• Formerly one of the most popular and biggest dubbing companies in America, 4Kids Entertainment is now primarily remembered for two things: their heavily Bowdlerised English dubs that frequently bordered on straight-up Macekre, combined with the dubs themselves making questionable writing changes and removing any traces of Japanese culture from their source materials, and the lawsuit filed out by TV Tokyo for using unlicensed footage of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which helped descend the company into bankruptcy.^note The company actually remerged in 2012, but filed for another bankruptcy in 2016 before shutting down entirely a year afterwards.
• If you weren't a reader of Act-age during its serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump, you most likely only know it as that one manga that was swiftly Cut Short, scrubbed off from Shonen Jump corporate history and withdrawn from circulation worldwide in August 2020 after its writer, Tatsuya Matsuki, was arrested for groping middle school girls.
• What's the only thing most people know about Air? The depressing ending where Misuzu dies slowly and painfully. This ending always was the main reason for criticism of this visual novel and anime, even among its most loyal fans.
• The manga The Beautiful Skies of Houou High barely made a blip in the U.S. and is generally despised both by fans and its own English publishers. Why? Because it's a manga that takes the Cure Your Gays route far too seriously, bringing along with it a whole mountain of Values Dissonance regarding lesbianism and gender roles. The English publishers treat it as an Old Shame and don't ever bring it up anymore.
• Bunny Drop started out as an innocent story about a young man taking in what he thought was his illegitimate half-aunt after his grandfather died and learning how to be a responsible parent to an abandoned child. Then the Time Skip happened, the little girl, now grown up, Rin realizes she has feelings for Daikichi, who raised her and is her father-figure and shares the same feelings. He raised her for 10 years, by the way, most when she was a very little girl. The whole half-aunt issue is handwaved in chapter 54, where it's revealed by her dead-beat mother she was adopted by Daikichi's grandfather and they really aren't blood relatives. Rin takes the news quite well and it ends with her implying she's ready to carry his child. This led to many fans speculating horrifying implications about how this little girl grew up to fall for her foster father and how he grew to love her that way as well. The twist is also cited as one of the most poorly hidden manga-ending spoilers out there. The anime and Live-Action Adaptation ignore the timeskip and focus on the two as being family. This is said by many fans, both in America and Japan to be a jarring shift in story and a terrible ending to what was a heartfelt and cute story. A good chunk of fans insists that the post-timeskip half of the manga never happened. It's to a point that the term "Usagi Dropped" was born to refer and warn people in case another series ended the same way as Bunny Drop did.
• Cheat Slayer is infamous not just because of its immensely violent, sexual, and problematic content, but in how it got cancelled after a single published chapter due to accusations of Shallow Parody that are closer to straight-up plagiarism of other isekai protagonists, who are portrayed exclusively as horrible, monstrous people that are nothing like their original counterparts, than any of the manga's actual story merits.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball Z Kai was just reaching the end of its initial run when accusations of plagiarism concerning Kenji Yamamoto's soundtrack struck, and all of said music had to be taken out in every re-run and re-release and replaced with pieces from Shunsuke Kikuchi's score for the original series. While Yamamoto's soundtrack for the series was already divisive, its legally obligated censorship only made things worse, with a new base emerging to try and defend Yamamoto's plagiarism.
  • In Latin America, Kai tends to be best remembered for the very negative reception its original run had due to massive censorship^note Toei used the censored version commissioned by Funimation for Nicktoons, instead of the original Japanese version like the one used for the Latin American Spanish dub of Dragon Ball Z. and, more importantly, the fact that almost all of the original cast, whose work reached cult status in the region, were replaced. The fallout from this led Toei to restructure their Latin American division and make it so that, in The Final Chapters, where possible, all characters were voiced by their original voice actors.^note The few exceptions were either due to retirement or death.
  • Dragon Ball Super was hit with this early on, thanks to the decision of making the first two sagas adaptations of the two canon Dragon Ball Z movies, which was seen as very repetitive and invoking It Was His Sled, especially since they had been released very recently at the time of Super's debut, and the notoriously awful animation early on, especially with Episode 5, ended up overshadowing any of the content. The series later improved, but the whole "rehashing the movies" and quality early on remains a stain.
  • Dragon Ball Z gets a lot of scrutiny from American videophiles because of the Digital Destruction that has plagued all home video releases since the mid-2000s, including, among other things, cropping the whole series to 16:9. Even the first 4:3 release in a long while, made from film elements Funimation happened to still have, got flack for excessive DVNR. It's gotten to the point where videophiles have gone on record as wanting to seek out the seven Dragon Balls to wish that Funimation would simply import and upscale the far superior-looking Dragon Box DVD releases issued by Toei.
• The ecchi manga and OVA Eiken was near-universally despised by viewers and critics, and has made virtually no impact otherwise... well, except for the fact that the girl with the largest breasts in an already exaggerated World of Buxom is only 11 years old.
• Idolmaster: Xenoglossia happens to be subject to this from The Idolmaster fandom because, rather than it be about idols like its source material, it was instead a mecha anime. Most of the cast being subject to Adaptational Personality Change as well as the major Adaptational Villainy given to Chihaya (and to a lesser extent, Yukiho) left a bad taste in the mouths of fans of the franchise. While the anime itself has been Vindicated by History, fans would rather not treat it as part of the Idolmaster franchise.
• Kemono Friends is mainly known nowadays by the Troubled Production its second season endured, including the director being pushed out and the blame for everything being shunted over to the voice cast, who had next to nothing to do with the trouble, among other things. The backlash to this, including the harassment of Tomason's staff by disgruntled fans (including an incident where the animation director's name was used to fraudulently sign the studio on for multiple paid online services, resulting in getting swamped with emails and phone calls asking for info) and the massive dislike bombing every episode got on Niconico in protest, is likely not to be forgotten as well.
• If anybody in the West who isn't a big anime fan brings up Kimba the White Lion, chances are it's to talk about the many accusations that The Lion King plagiarized the story.
• Kinnikuman is best known for the controversy surrounding the character Brocken Jr., who is a good guy with a Nazi-themed outfit, complete with swastikas. Due to this character, the series was pulled from broadcast in France shortly after he debuted.
• Kodomo no Jikan (A Child's Time), proposed English title Nymphet, was licensed by publisher Seven Seas Entertainment but never released in America due to its lolicon overtones. They had only seen the first book, which isn't too bad in terms of content. Then the controversy erupted. Initially, Seven Seas defended the title, but a combination of major book chains refusing to stock it and their reading the later volumes, which come very close to violating the PROTECT Act, caused them to change their mind and drop it.
• Koi Kaze is well known for being about an Age-Gap Romance between a 27-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl, who are also siblings who were separated at a young age. Even though the series covers the topic more maturely and realistically than one might expect, it's still controversial due to the premise.
• Ask anyone who has heard of the anime adaptation of Kokoro Connect, and you'll hear it be associated with Mitsuhiro Ichiki's controversial treatment during the promotional phase. He was tricked into giving a fake audition for a character that didn't exist, embarrassed himself on TV, and had the producer say he didn't regret any of it. This angered many people, including some voice actors.
• Kosuke Fujishima is well known for creating Ah! My Goddess and being the character designer for Sakura Wars and Tales Series. However in 2017, his divorce with his first wife and later engagement to a much younger woman ended up overshadowing his work. It wouldn't be until 2020 with Tales of Crestoria until he was back to doing character designs.
• Kuni Ga Moeru, a series dealing with a family caught up in the Second Sino-Japanese War and later the War in Asia and the Pacific. The series is best known, however, for its lost chapter, dealing with one of the main characters having to witness the Nanking Massacre after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. The mangaka, Hiroshi Motomiya, pulled exactly zero punches in depicting the event. This caused massive backlash when the chapter was published in Weekly Young Jump. Much of the controversy centered on the illustration of a photo, based on a genuine (though its veracity is disputed) photograph, allegedly depicting a Japanese soldier posing by a Chinese woman he had just raped. Due to liberties taken by the artist, as well as criticism concerning the provenance and veracity of the photograph, Motomiya was accused by elements from the nationalist right of trying to libel the Imperial Japanese Army. Shueisha, the publisher, responded by apologizing and having Motomiya putting the series on hiatus and removing that specific chapter from being republished in tankouban form. This caused more outrage from the other side who then began accusing Shueisha of wihtewashing history and caving to the right wing of the LDP and then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who had resumed Prime Ministerial visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in 2001. It didn't help that said visits had ignited protests and riots in China and South Korea, due to infamous World War II figures being commemorated at the shrine.^note In another evocation of this exact same trope, the shrine was established after the Meiji Restoration to house the kami, or spirits, of Japanese who had fallen in war. In that case, it was merely intended as a spiritual Arlington Cemetary. However, in 1978, in a secret midnight ceremony that even Emperor Hirohito did not know about, the kami of the executed "Class-A" war criminals including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were enshrined. Once Hirohito found out, he declared his disapproval and that he would refuse to visit the shrine evermore, a policy his successors have followed to this day.
• Kuroko's Basketball is infamous as the manga that was targeted by domestic terrorists and is at least as well-known for the Fanwork Ban, which has since been lifted, and removal of merchandise that resulted from the poison threats as it is for its artistic merits and accomplishments. It doesn't help that the terror threats dominated the news in anime circles for over a year. To this day, it's still not known why the suspect who was caught targeted the manga and everyone associating with it even tangentially, or even if he had acted alone in his threats, but it's speculated a personal grudge against author Fujimaki Tadatoshi may have had something to do with it.
• Lotte no Omocha! (Lotte's Toy!) features a female protagonist who is a succubus princess of a fantasy kingdom. Well, OK, nothing bad about it so far until you learn that the female protagonist is also 10 years old, she's expected to start creating her own male harem as part of her royal duties, and she will die if she doesn't drink Life Essence from male beings. It went about as well as you'd expect, and the sheer concentrated lolicon on display is all it's known for.
• The anime adaptation of Love Lab is most well-known for a scene in episode 8 where the main characters attempt to pay tribute to black celebrities by dressing in brown makeup and acting out affectionate parodies of them. While it didn't cause much of a fuss in Japan, the scene caused an uproar in the West thanks to its resemblance to blackface (complete with large, bright lips) and Minstrel Shows. While the intention of the scene is about as well known as its execution, the heavy Values Dissonance of the latter ensured that it would be far better-known than anything else in the series, to the point where "love lab blackface" and "love lab anime racist" are still popularly-suggested search results on Google in a neutral setting.
• The Love Live! franchise is becoming increasingly known for bad press generated by badly-behaving fans. The worst incident was a vandalism incident involving manhole covers bearing the images of the main characters in June 2018, which resulted in the manhole covers being pulled indefinitely.
• The Macross franchise is better known for the sheer amount of legal trouble that it was involved with in the United States. To explain, Big West Advertising, the primary sponsor of the franchise, partnered with Tatsunoko Production to help secure financial funding for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which gave the latter the rights to the international distribution of the series. Tatsunoko would then license Macross, along with two of its own productions, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, to Harmony Gold USA, who reworked all three of them into a single narrative for syndication purposes: Robotech. Through this, Harmony Gold would claim all the rights to the Macross franchise in the United States. This has lead to Macross producer Studio Nue and the aforementioned Big West to pursue legal action, and has resulted in most of the installments in the franchise never leaving Japan until 2021, when a deal was finally made with the two parties.
• Perhaps the one thing most people remember about Midori (Shōjo Tsubaki), the 1992 film adaptation of Mr Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, is the fact that it was banned by the Japanese government for 14 years because of its graphic depictions of child molestation and animal abuse, rather than being known for its actual plot or the fact that it overtly depicts child molestation and animal abuse in a scathingly negative light.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion became embroiled in controversy when Netflix picked it up for streaming in 2019, as it was completely redubbed and retranslated from the ground up at the insistence of Studio Khara. The announcement of a redub itself was hotly contested by fans of the original ADV Films dub, especially since none of the original English cast returned, but the new translation as a whole became an even greater subject of scrutiny when it was discovered that it was far more literal to the extent of Bowdlerising a number of fan favorite lines from the more Woolseyism-rich ADV dub— including toning down the script's hints at a possible romantic connection between Shinji and Kaworu (e.g. changing most instances of "love" to "like" and replacing Kaworu's description of Shinji as "worthy of love" with "worthy of my grace"), which many LGBT+ and allied fans quickly decried as homophobic. Because of this, it's become difficult to discuss Evangelion in the west without bringing up Khara's stricter handling of it, and despite Netflix having nothing to do with the changes, the controversy surrounding the retranslation is still touted as a microcosm of longstanding issues with their poor treatment of media from outside the Anglosphere.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • The episode "Computer Warrior Porygon"^note more commonly known and referred to as "Electric Soldier Porygon" is known far more for gaining the questionable record of "Most Photosensitive Epileptic Seizures Caused by a Television Show" from Guinness World Records for causing 700 seizures in Japan upon its initial airing, and the resulting worldwide ban of the episode, than the actual content itself. This extends to the Pokémon Porygon itself. Despite not being the actual cause of the flashing,^note it was a missile blowing up it's swept under the rug for no other reason than it being the Pokémon featured in the episode. Even its evolutions have been hit with it, as they've made no major appearances in the series.^note Though they did have a cameo in the fifteenth movie's intro. After this incident, OLM, the animation studio behind Pokémon, dropped all strobe lights caused by Pikachu's attacks in future episodes of the anime and re-edited the first 37 episodes to eliminate said effects. This even extended to anime as a whole—ever since this snafu, any fast-paced scenes that could conceivably cause seizures have to be darkened for the broadcast version.
  • Pokémon: The Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon is known less for any of its own merits and more for being associated with the controversy that followed after Pokémon USA, now known as The Pokémon Company International, fired the English voice actors that had been working on the anime since day one in favor of newer, cheaper ones.^note In addition to some Japanese Pokémon voices that remained undubbed, two voice actors, Kayzie Rogers and Jimmy Zoppi, by then in minor roles (their most significant roles being Wobbuffet and Gary Oak, respectively), were the only ones retained, and were given greater presence within the series (Rogers replacing Veronica Taylor and Amy Birnbaum as Ash and Max, respectively, though a redub of the same special dropped her from Ash's role onward, and Zoppi replacing Eric Stuart, Maddie Blaustein, and Stan Hart as James, Meowth, and Professor Oak). The big recast actually reinstated Rodger Parsons as narrator after he had left the series prior to it, and many of the other old actors, IE Lisa Ortiz, Jason Griffith, Erica Schroeder, Dan Green, and Marc Thompson, began voicing new characters in prominent roles, while others such as Mike Pollock (Raoul Contesta) and Ted Lewis (Giovanni) even reprised characters they had voiced beforehand, and main cast members Maddie Blaustein and Rachael Lillis briefly played characters of the day. The earlier seasons since the recast made use of some of the pre-existing dub audio for the Pokémon themselves, most notably Eric Stuart as Ash's Squirtle and former casting director Michael Haigney as Snorlax, before eventually finding new actors for many of those Pokémon.
  • Pokémon the Series: Black & White was initially met with much fan excitement in large part due to building up to Team Plasma, whose popularity in Pokémon Black and White was a driving force behind the franchise's Popularity Polynomial at the time. However, the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster caused it to be canned right before they were intended to appear, after which its other praised parts petered out and weaknesses became more prominent. Meanwhile, the sequels Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 being released instead of a third version as expected meant Team Plasma's appearance was based entirely on their sequel appearance, lacking what made them well-received in the first game and instead coming off as generic villains. This underwhelming payoff for a series-long wait and decline was followed up and ended on a filler arc due to its brisk pacing causing them to run out of material until the next games, irreparably tarnishing things. In short Black & White is best remembered for starting strong only for the 2011 Fukushima disaster to derail and cause it to rot, regardless of its strengths or missteps long after what can be fairly attributed to the 2011 disaster.
  • Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened is mostly remembered for the fan backlash surrounding the inclusion of a second, female Mewtwo and the implied (but eventually debunked) retcon of Mewtwo's backstory that it created, to the point where it has its own folder on the film's YMMV page.^note Years later, it was revealed that the reason for the film's Mewtwo being different was because the estate of Takeshi Shudō held the rights to the Mewtwo from the first movie, so they opted to instead create a lawyer-friendly version of that Mewtwo. This backlash extended to Mega Mewtwo Y, which debuted in the film as the second Mewtwo's Super Mode and was subsequently "tainted." Only when it was used in the Final Smash of the Super Smash Bros. Mewtwo (who is mostly based on the original Mewtwo in Pokémon: The First Movie) was its association with the movie weakened.
  • Pokémon the Series: XY became this over Ash losing the Kalos League. Ash losing the regions league is nothing new nor is fan backlash, but the unprecedented appeal to older fans of XY, Ash's unprecedented skill and maturity as a trainer, his highly built and hyped up Ash-Greninja, the episode's title, promotional materials and other factors^Explanation it was the franchise's 20th anniversary, and the next games were seemingly doing away with traditional Leagues all pointed to him finally winning. Ash's losing the Finals to Alain thus caused unprecedented backlash across both sides of the Pacific as invalidating everything praised about XY by having the seeming payoff of his win never happen and turned the previously well-liked Alain into a fandom pariah. Despite the immediately following Team Flare arc and rest of XY being seen as the best in The Series they're still mostly remembered by fans in terms of the debate if the Kalos League negated all their good or not. Ash won the next series League in what's seen as damage control and creator apology, but rather than forgive XY fans changed the issue to debating if his winning Kalos would have been better due to its stronger setup.
• In 2017, Rurouni Kenshin returned with a new volume after a nearly twenty-year hiatus... just in time for creator Nobuhiro Watsuki to be arrested for possession of child pornography, scuttling the new series almost as soon as it began and retroactively tainting the old one. Not helping was that it hugely undermined the manga's central message about moral improvement: this coming out in the way it did, instead of the author himself admitting it, makes it hard for fans to rewatch the series without feeling hypocritical. And despite Watsuki expressing regret for his actions, paying a fine, and returning to work in April 2018, the damage is already done and fans are mixed whether to support his work or not. There's also the publisher Shueisha letting him continue to work after six months since the charges, which many people felt was too soon, given that the controversy was (and continues to be) still fresh in the people's minds.
• Sailor Moon:
  • The only thing most know about the DiC/Cloverway dub is that it made several changes to the original, most infamously changing Haruka and Michiru, a lesbian couple, into cousins. However, because a good deal of the romantic subtext wasn't removed, this led many fans to assume that they were not just lesbians, but incestuous to boot.
  • When the anime was airing in Italy, there was a huge controversy in 1997 due to an infamous statement of psychologist Vera Slepoj, who claimed that being a strong fighter is an exclusively manly trait, while a girly/female superheroine is a bad role model for little boys who want to imitate her, making them "sexually confused".^note This happened seven years before Winx Club, an Italian show largely inspired by Sailor Moon. The headline of her article was "Kids, don't watch Sailor Moon, it will turn you into sissies", which was considered outrageous even in the '90s and caused so many discussions that the Italian dub of Sailor Stars (the season that was airing at the time) was ridiculously censored: the Sailor Starlights, women who disguise themselves as men and revert to their female form when transformed, were changed into real men with twin sisters who occasionally take their place.^note The Starlights were voiced by men in their civilian forms, meaning that they couldn't just be made female at all times like in other dubs. This change only applies to episode 188 and you can tell some scenes were redubbed later (in every "twin sisters" scene, Usagi is voiced by Donatella Fanfani instead of her usual voice actress Elisabetta Spinelli). This is dropped like a sack of bricks afterward, but it's such a clumsy workaround that it's easily the most infamous edit from that dub. Not helping matters is that the controversy played a considerable role in Naoko Takeuchi's infamous international embargo that lasted through the better part of the following decade.
• The 1993-1994 and 2000-2002 OVAs of Stardust Crusaders drew considerable attention in 2008 when Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists discovered shots of DIO, the non-Muslim Big Bad, reading The Qur'an.^note In the original manga, DIO was reading a nondescript book with gray boxes for text. Since he was residing in Egypt, APPP decided to replace the nondescript gray boxes with the first Arabic text they could find. Unfortunately for them, the most commonly circulated Arabic text happens to be the Quran, the Muslim holy book. This may not seem like it would be such a big deal in the Western world or East Asia, but it started a firestorm of controversy in much of the Islamic world. Since some fundamentalist Muslims, such as the ones in question, believe that only Muslims are entitled to read the Quran, the sight of a supernatural non-Muslim glancing at a few pages of it was bound to infuriate them. Repercussions of this controversy spread elsewhere: Shueisha cut off ties with A.P.P.P., circulation of the OVAs was temporarily halted to remove the Quran text, and Hirohiko Araki himself was forced to redraw the original manga to replace mosques and other Muslim buildings that get harmed or destroyed with more secular constructions, which carried over to David Productions' later adaptation. The whole incident and the resulting censorship was heavily scorned by critics as "embarrassing," and Shueisha's distancing from A.P.P.P. is heavily believed to be one of the leading contributors to the Keep Circulating the Tapes fate of both the OVAs and A.P.P.P.'s 2007 film adaptation of Phantom Blood. More than a decade later, the Quran controversy remains one of the biggest points of discussion surrounding the OVAs for anyone who aren't already fans of JoJo or OVA staff member Satoshi Kon.
• Usually, the only times Stitch! comes up among Western Lilo & Stitch fans is to complain about it being a Stealth Sequel and how it ruins the original series' theme about "ʻohana" and family. Even fans of the anime hated the episode where Lilo appears, as originally the anime was marketed as an Alternate Universe.
• Yuki Suegutsu is chiefly known for two things: her Career Resurrection with Chihayafuru and her earlier career low point with Eden no Hana in which she plagiarized Takehiko Inoue's art, putting all manga serialized in the Bessatsu Friend magazine on an international blacklist for over a decade.
• The life and career of Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata was overshadowed in August 2018 by revelations that he was a Prima Donna Director, being so tough to work under that his exacting standards may have led to the untimely passing of up-and-coming Ghibli talent Yoshifumi Kondō, ^note Kondō died in 1998 from aortic dissection, which was said by his doctors to have been brought on from being overworked. a theory that fellow Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki and Takahata himself were willing to believe. Worse, he died without ever having to account for the damage he might have done, leaving his legacy (if not the enjoyability of his works) up in the air. The controversy never made Takahata's movies' reputations radioactive, but it's still an elephant in the room when it comes to discussing Takahata and his works.
• Previously a major hit series in Japan and a cult favorite in the West, since the late 2010s, it's been difficult to discuss Toriko without bringing up author Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro's 2002 arrest for soliciting sex from a 16-17-year-old, which resulted in a one-year prison sentence and the cancellation of Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi!. While Toriko previously served as a Career Resurrection, the arrest of Nobuhiro Watsuki in 2017 brought Shimabukuro's past to public prominence outside of Japan for the first time, generating so much backlash that Shimabukuro's following series Build King was highly criticized solely for his involvement (it did end up Cut Short, but most likely for other reasons).
• Transformers, being an American toy line created by importing and re-purposing Japanese toys, has had several Japanese media, many of which fall into this:
  • Transformers Kiss Players is undoubtedly best known for its blatantly suggestive imagery involving teenage girls that look prepubescent. Western fans were disgusted by this, while Japanese fans were embarrassed and feared it would irrevocably color perceptions of Japanese Transformers media in foreign countries.
  • Transformers: Armada is mainly remembered for debuting in the U.S. six months before it debuted in Japan, the animation and translation errors that resulted from it, and the first half focusing almost entirely on finding Mini-Cons.
• In the west at least, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is known less for its actual content and more for the frequent debates among audiences regarding the title character's massive chest, which are considered unusually huge for a mainstream Slice of Life series and jar with her otherwise looking significantly younger than she actually is. While the controversy ultimately boosted the anime adaptation's popularity to the forefront of the wider anime fandom, it nonetheless dominates the discussion of both the series and the summer 2020 anime block as a whole.
• In early February 2018, internet users found the Twitter account of Kazuyoshi Yaginuma, long-renowned for his work on a number of high-profile anime, most notably his direction of the anime adaptation of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, only to find that he's a virulent Neo-Nazi who had been posting and endorsing anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler content since joining Twitter in 2011. The discovery led to Signal.MD terminating their association with Yaginuma, who proceeded to blame his firing on a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy instead of considering that it had anything to do with him being a Neo-Nazi, and his Twitter account was suspended in the fallout of that. Needless to say, discussions surrounding him revolve less on the merits of his artistic output and more on his beliefs and the ethics of supporting the works he contributed to despite them, with MMO Junkie being hit the hardest thanks to both his directorship and the adaptation's recency when the controversy broke out.

Art

• Snow White and the Madness of Truth was an item of Swedish installation art erected in 2004 that quickly garnered international attention when Zvi Mazel, then the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, vandalized it by deliberately causing a short circuit. With this act, Zvi ignited a firestorm of discussion around the piece, most prominently a debate about whether it was anti-Semitic. Ironically, Dror Feiler, one of the artists behind it, is an Israeli-born Jew.

Asian Animation

• In the English-speaking world, it is impossible to find coverage of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf without finding news on that one time two kids in China tried to imitate something they saw on the show and ended up seriously injuring themselves. Even worse, it even seriously affected the popularity of the series, and led to increased censorship in the Chinese industry, which resulted in the series needing to be bowdlerised on digital streaming services. However, it eventually won back the crowd since Mighty Little Defenders aired in 2019.

Automobiles

• The first-generation Chevrolet Corvair was one of GM's most popular models during the 1960s, but it is better known today for its handling issues, a problem that was further compounded when it was revealed by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe at Any Speed that GM executives had declined to include suspension upgrades that would have made the car safer after calculating that paying off lawsuits was cheaper than re-engineering the car.
• The General Motors EV1 was one of the first mass-produced electric cars and had a moderate amount of success when it first came out. Today, it is best known for the fact that General Motors would end up forcefully repossessing several units of the car and destroying them (with a few intact units being disabled and donated to museums)^note Only one completely intact and running EV-1 is known to still exist (though there's rumors of others), at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., believing that the car was unprofitable. The EV1's discontinuation remains controversial to this day, with many accusing General Motors of deliberate self-sabotage, and accusing the oil industry of trying to keep electric cars off the road.
• The Ford Pinto was actually a good car with better reliability than its American competitors but is remembered for the gas tank flaw from its first couple of years model that made it explode in rear-end collisions. Even the trope referring to exploding cars is called Every Car Is a Pinto.
• Google's self-driving car/Automated Automobiles project is seen like this, with some people seeing it as Reed Richards Is Useless technology (and by extension, a Job-Stealing Robot). It's also hard to talk about self-driving cars without bringing up concerns over the possibility of such a car causing a crash due to a glitch, and arguments over who should be held responsible for the accident in such a situation.
• Uber counts, not only due to the Automated Automobiles, but also being a way to steal taxi driver's jobs, as the many Uber protests show. The controversies surrounding its former CEO Travis Kalanick haven't helped matters.
• The Pontiac G6 suffered an extremely ill-considered marketing ploy in which the entire audience for an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show was given a car for free, with the quickly memetic "You get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car!" Just one problem: ownership of the car also meant a sizable spike in the recipients' income, meaning they wound up with a $6,000 tax hike, and with much of the audience for the episode specifically chosen because they badly needed a car, they were naturally in no position to pay it, meaning many of the cars ended up being sold just to cover their own cost. The disaster almost certainly played at least some part in the death of Pontiac, something its Aztek was already in the process of doing. Oprah learned her lesson, and the numerous similar promotions she's done since have also included a check to cover the taxes.
• Tesla Motors has courted controversy not just for its working conditions and vehicles catching fire, but also for the erratic behaviour of its CEO Elon Musk, particularly after his buyout of Twitter.

Comic Strips

• Pepe the Frog, a character from the comic Boy's Club, became a widespread meme after his debut in 2005. However, the usage of Pepe as a meme turned awry in mid-2016 when many members of the alt-right used him as a symbol to express racist and anti-Semitic sentiments around the time of the 2016 U.S. election.^note It's possible that some of the offensive Pepe memes, especially those from before 2016, were originally meant more as Vulgar Humor than serious political statements, since other "Rare Pepes" often featured gratuitous Body Horror, coprophilia, Gorn, and various sex acts instead of racist imagery, all played for extremely dark laughs, until genuine bigots started blurring the lines between satire and serious. The damage had been done by the time the Anti-Defamation League classified Pepe as a hate symbol.^note Though they did include the caveat that Pepe is not inherently a hate symbol and context should be taken into account when judging whether using him is hateful. Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, was so angry over this that he attempted a "Save Pepe" campaign in order to rescue the character. However, in May 2017, Furie decided to kill off Pepe in his comic after the character became more ingrained as a symbol of the far-right. Furie did succeed in enforcing his copyright in certain cases, such as forcing InfoWars's Alex Jones to pay $15,000 in a lawsuit for selling merchandise with Pepe on it, but the reputation as an alt-right meme is very hard to erase.
• These days, Dilbert creator Scott Adams is considerably better-known for his outspoken support of former US President Donald Trump than for his cartooning. And while the average comic strip reader might ordinarily be willing to overlook a cartoonist's politics, Adams drew quite a bit of attention to it when he published a rather controversial pro-Trump book whose cover art featured an image of Dogbert with Trump's hair. Because of this, Dilbert unsurprisingly lost a lot of fans who dislike Trump. Even before that, Adams was no stranger to controversy; he had previously provoked outrage in a blog post where he claimed that rape was a "natural instinct" for men and that men who committed rape were just victims of a society that criminalized their natural desires.
• For many years, For Better or for Worse was among the most respected of comic strips, notable for its characters aging in real time and its willingness to do risky things (such as introduce an openly gay character well before such things were mainstream). Then, as it neared its end, it introduced a storyline where main character Elizabeth left behind her life teaching in a First Nations village to move back to her hometown and enter a relationship with the extremely unpopular character of Anthony (after he had broken up his marriage because his wife wanted to go back to work after having a child and expected him to live up to a promise he made). Not helping was the "going-after" sequence, where Anthony saves Elizabeth from Attempted Rape only to immediately beg her to get together with him (leading to the memetic "I HAVE NO HOME!" moment). This decision destroyed the comic's reputation, to the point that almost all discussion of it nowadays centers on that storyline.
• In its heyday, Li'l Abner was one of the most famous and influential comics strips in America. Moreover, strip creator Al Capp was a well-known and recognizable public figure in his own right. But in the 1960s, Capp drifted into a right-wing crank who sneered at folk singers and political activists (memorably berating a bemused John Lennon and Yoko Ono on camera during their 1969 "bed-in" in Montreal), and this started bleeding into the comic itself. Before long, his politics became a cloud that hung over his work. Then he was arrested on sex-related charges in 1971 and papers began to drop his strip in droves, contributing to the comic strip ending in 1977 (Capp was also in ill health by the end of The '70s, and died in 1979). Now, it's hard to talk about the strip without discussing its creator's prickly personality, ideological hang-ups, and the allegations that he committed sexual misconduct.

Film — Animation

• Abominable is remembered for a scene which had a map with the nine-dash-line on it which resulted in the movie being banned in countries in Southeast Asia; the protests in Hong Kong that were happening at the same time when the movie came out didn't help matters as well. Despite this, the film was still a success at least, but not enough for a sequel to be developed.
• The one thing most people remember about Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, aside from the music by Mastodon, is the Viral Marketing campaign involving LED signs displaying the Mooninites Flipping the Bird. One of the signs was mistaken for an IED, which resulted in the Boston Bomb Scare. This incident (unrelated to an actual bombing during the Boston Marathon a few years later) led to Jim Samples stepping down as the head of Cartoon Network and being replaced with Stuart Snyder.
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is remembered for two controversial scenes: the Bonk vs. the Joker scene in which the latter kills the former with the "Bang!" Flag Gun, and the entire flashback scene, with the very noteworthy part near the end in which Robin does the same thing to the Joker. Even before the film was released to video and DVD in 2000, movie companies were coming under heavy criticism for violence in films during the fallout of the Columbine shootings that had happened over a year ago, and WB felt pressured and afraid that Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs would object that the movie would be a repeat of Columbine. As a result, the original release date (Halloween 2000) was postponed, and the film heavily edited and toned down for release on December 12. But even then, the Bowdlerised version (especially with the Joker's death scene changed to death by electrocution) didn't help matters, but only caused unrest among many Batman fans that lasted for over a year. That unrest was thankfully quelled when the film developers retained the original version and eventually released it on DVD as "the original, uncut version" under the PG-13 rating on April 23, 2002 (just three days after the third anniversary of the Columbine tragedy) following an online petition to have it released. The same uncut version would be digitally remastered and released on Blu-Ray nine years later.
• Batman: The Killing Joke: The original Killing Joke comic has the Joker paralyzing Barbara Gordon as its inciting incident, with little statement of who she actually is in the story itself. The Animated Adaptation attempts to correct this by expanding Barbara's role in the story, but it's done in a way that comes off as more problematic than the comic: namely, it does so by introducing sexual tension between Batgirl and Batman^note as well as implying that Barbara became Batgirl largely because she had a crush on Batman. This culminates in the two having sex, which creeped out a good portion of the audience, especially those who see Batman as more of a paternal mentor to Batgirl in other media. And that's not even getting into the debates on whether the first half of the movie, which set Barbara up as a character, should've even been made in a movie called "The Killing Joke".
• In Coco, this happens In-Universe to the Big Bad: a year after Ernesto de la Cruz is exposed as both a plagiarist and a murderer, his mausoleum is in ruins, his "Remember Me" statue has been vandalized with a sign saying "FORGET YOU", and Word of God confesses that he won't be able to experience being forgotten because he is Hated by All.
• Coonskin, Ralph Bakshi's satirical Blaxploitation re-imagining of the Uncle Remus tales. Al Sharpton famously criticized the film without even seeing it, saying, "I don't got to see shit; I can smell shit!" This gave the film some very bad publicity. Since then, professional critics and black audiences have praised it for being the complete opposite of being racist. Even Spike Lee is a fan.
• The 2019 Spanish animated feature Elcano & Magellan: The First Voyage Around the World, based on the voyage of the Iberian explorers of the same name (of which one of the most famous episodes was the Battle of Mactan), prompted major backlash in the Philippines, largely due to the poster showing Lapulapu (a native chief who participated in the battle and is widely revered as an anticolonialist hero in the Philippines) in a decidedly villainous light. The backlash was to the point that many Filipinos petitioned to ban the movie in the country. The studio in charge seemed to have gotten the hint, as they released a redesigned version of the poster where Lapulapu is replaced with a fictional Portuguese character named Yago. As it turns out, the original poster was rather inaccurate, as the Portuguese is the main antagonist of the movie and Lapulapu is little more than a glorified background character.
• Olaf's Frozen Adventure became known soon after its release less because of anything related to the film itself and more because of the circumstances behind said release: It was originally meant for a television special before being put as the opener for the Pixar film Coco, and the fact that its length was meant for television and not as an opener for a Pixar film upset many of the moviegoers who went just to see Coco. It went to the point that most Mexican movie theaters outright removed the short from their showings of Coco (as Coco prominently features Mexican culture as its backdrop) before Disney officially pulled it from all future screenings of Coco beginning on December 8, 2017. While Disney has not given an official reason why Toy Story 4 was the first Pixar film since Toy Story to not have a short subject attached to its theatrical release, the scuttlebutt is that Olaf's Frozen Adventure had a lot to do with it.
• The South Korean Fractured Fairy Tale film Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs probably would have flown completely under the radar had it not been for controversy over the marketing, which showed the two forms its main character would apparently take in the film (one a chubby young woman, one a more "traditional" princess look) and implied that the chubby form was ugly, drawing accusations of body shaming. The few who have seen the movie were quick to point out that this was a case of heavily Misaimed Marketing^note as well as Values Dissonance, as South Korea has some rather skewered beauty expectations.

• Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism are today mostly overshadowed by the controversies of creator Nina Paley who became infamous for her hostility towards the transgender community and followers of the Jewish and Christian religions.
• Skydance Animation serves as one of the newly added divisions of film studio Skydance Media. Formed in 2017 through a multi-year partnership with Ilion Animation Studios, the new division gained recognition as a potential contender for producing future high quality animated films. However, they came under immediate fire in January 2019, when it was announced that Pixar founder and former Disney executive John Lasseter was made head of the division. As Lasseter was struck with multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and sexist behavior less than two years prior, Skydance was met with heavy criticism for being willing to work with him, let alone having him be head of one of their divisions. As a result, both the division and Skydance Media as a whole lost a lot of support from most of the public. This also cost them Emma Thompson, who'd been set to star in one of the films placed under Lasseter's supervision and then quit over his hiring even before she'd been announced to be in the film, leading to even more attention being placed on the issue. And then she published an open letter condemning them for forcing all their employees into a choice between working with a person they may find morally reprehensible or losing their jobs.
• The Thief and the Cobbler is mostly well known for its decades-long stint in Development Hell, director Richard Williams being removed from his own pet project by the completion bond company brought on to complete it, being finished in a vastly different form in Australia and South Africa under the title The Princess and the Cobbler, and receiving an edited and partially re-dubbed North American release by Miramax Films under the title Arabian Knight.

Jokes

• This is made light of in-universe in a classic joke about a drunken old Scotsman who vents to a younger patron at the same bar about how he'd accumulated a laundry list of accomplishments over his long life, but nobody remembers them because he once had sex with a goat.

Networks

• The Cartoon Network block Tickle U suffered from this when a group of Moral Guardians tried to get the block off the air for its false educational claims. This is likely one of the reasons the block didn't even last a year.

Pinball

• Ex-Bally/Williams pinball designer John Popadiuk is overshadowed by the Development Hell of games produced by his company, Zidware^note (Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, and Alice in Wonderland). With millions of dollars in pre-order money collected and little results since 2011, he has been accused of defrauding customers.
• A shadow hangs over pinball designer John Trudeau's games, including Ghostbusters, after he was charged with alleged possession of child pornography in 2017 and then the sexual abuse of a minor the next year. Stern Pinball announced his firing, removed all mention of his name, and has refused to identify what projects he was working on as lead designer. Comments from the artist Zombie Yeti subsequently revealed that he was the original designer of Deadpool prior to his arrest, and his work was thrown out entirely (with the final game being designed by George Gomez).
• Kevin Kulek, the founder of boutique manufacturer Skit-B Pinball, is more known for allegations of defrauding customers with a Predator game that was never licensed by 20th Century Fox (who shut down the project).

Radio

• Shock Jock Don Imus had fifty years of experience in the radio business. However, most people know him for a 2007 incident where he referred to the Rutgers University women's basketball team (which included nine black players) as "nappy-headed hos". His apology and CBS Radio's decision to suspend him (and subsequently cancel his show, Imus in the Morning, which moved to Citadel Media a few months later) ignited further controversy, with some saying he earned forgiveness with his apology, and others saying a strong stand needed to be taken.
• Shock Jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem has held an active career in radio since 1986. However, his professional life has since taken a back seat to the revelation that he was the one who filmed the Hulk Hogan sex tape that led to Hogan's 2015 suspension from the WWE for racist language in the tape and Hogan suing Gawker Media, who publicized the tape, into bankruptcy for invasion of privacy the following year. Clem later apologized to Hogan after the suit, but remains best known among the general public for his involvement in the scandal.
• Big Finish Doctor Who cast actor James Dreyfus as an early incarnation of The Master, making his debut in The Destination Wars. However, between this and his second story, The Home Guard, it came to light that Dreyfus had made some transphobic comments, and Big Finish would put out a statement of equality and diversity. Big Finish played down Dreyfus's involvement in subsequent stories, and after releasing the final audio record that featured Dreyfus's Master, The Psychic Circus, the company has not cast him in any future Master stories.
• KEGL in Dallas, Texas is mostly known for a prank by their evening drive shock jocks Kramer and Twitch wherein they claimed that Britney Spears was killed in a car accident. The hoax led to hundreds of calls to local law enforcement agencies and a massive internet firestorm, which ended in Kramer and Twitch being shown the door by KEGL owners Clear Channel.
• Prolific Shock Jock Steve Dahl tends to be known less for his long, widespread career and more for his status as a major figure in the Disco Sucks movement, organizing the infamous Disco Demolition Night that galvanized an American backlash against disco music that, in the late 2010s, was found to have been punctuated by undercurrents of bigotry against the genre's popularity with black and gay communities. Dahl, for his part, simply held a grudge against his old radio station WDAI after it fired him to shift focus exclusively on disco, but he never expressed regret over his involvement with the movement, even after the more bigoted aspects of it came to light, allowing it to eventually go from his claim to fame to one of the most debated aspects of his career, ultimately eclipsing everything else he had done outside of his core following.

• The hosts of the Australian radio programme Hot30 Countdown, Mel Greig and Mike Christian, will definitely be remembered more for causing the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse they prank-called by impersonating Queen Elizabeth II and then-Prince Charles to find out that Princess Kate was pregnant, than anything else. Saldanha even blamed them in a suicide note she left behind. While the hosts never faced criminal charges for her death, they were nevertheless soon fired and the programme was cancelled.

Tabletop Games

• Chess:
  • Former World Champion Bobby Fischer became known in later years for disavowing his Jewish heritage and becoming an anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorist (notably blaming 9/11 on the Jewish people), which put a damper on his legacy.
  • A lot of people mostly remember Armenian grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian^note Not to be confused with former World Champion Tigran Petrosian for his reaction to being accused of cheating in the 2020 PRO Chess League: he posted an angry, poorly-spelled rant including memorable phrases like "You are a biggest looser I ever seen in my life! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when I was beating players much more stronger then you!". It didn't help that Chess.com eventually found him guilty.
  • While Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura is a popular streamer, it's hard to talk about him without getting into the allegations of poor sportsmanship and how the community reacted to it.
  • Sergey Karjakin's support of Putin had always been a turn-off to potential fans, but it really started overshadowing his chess achievements after Russia invaded Ukraine. While many Russian top players condemned the move or at least remained silent, Karjakin eagerly supported it (going as far as calling Ukraine "stupid"), and repeatedly doubled down after being criticized for it. This earned him several bans, most notably a six-month ban from FIDE events. Now he tends to be more remembered for supporting Putin than for his chess. While some people feel that his ban set a problematic precedent, few people will defend his actual views.
• Vampire: The Masquerade was scheduled for a much-hyped relaunch into the world of Tabletop Role-Playing Games during their Renaissance during the late New Tens. Things were looking up for the owners at White Wolf, with a launch that could rival Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. Then people discovered some unfortunate ties to alt-right ideology in the test material and Quickstart guide. White Wolf was slow to address the storm of anger brewing on the internet, and the article's writer claimed to have been contacted by White Wolf's attorneys with a threat of lawsuits if the article wasn't taken down. This went as well as could be expected. Soon the TTRPG community associated Fifth Edition with alt-right ideology, and White Wolf rushed out an apology, claimed the whole thing was a coincidence, and included a denunciation of the alt-right in the main rulebook. If White Wolf mortally wounded their brand with the Vampire Quickstart guide, they would kill it when they dropped the Camarilla Sourcebook. The book treated the still-ongoing terror campaign against homosexuals in Chechnya as a plot point for vampire shenanigans. The Chechen Government threatened to sue White Wolf, claiming the concentration camps where journalists have documented the torture and murders are still taking place are actually completely normal prisons and there couldn't be a gay pogrom because "there are no gay people in Chechnya!" This was the final straw for White Wolf and ultimately resulted in it being folded into their parent company, Paradox Interactive.
• In Warhammer 40,000 the Squats (Dwarves IN SPACE) were dropped early on in the game due to a variety of factors.^note  A combination of the models not selling as well as they had hoped along with the general shift in tone made the Squats a creative dead end. It didn't help that a lot of their rules overlapped with other armies at the time, so they were seen as dead weight when third edition rolled around. However, the way GW handled their discontinuation has been infamous in the fandom; after much heckling from people who still liked them and hated the "squatting" of the squats, GW started banning anyone who made mention of the Squats on their personal forums and absolute refusal to even discuss the matter at public events. While the rest of the line was spared from this, "squat" ended up evolving into a term meaning "to be discontinued and erased from canon" within the fandom. It's only during the Kevin Rountree era that GW finally started acknowledging the Squats, likely wanting to turn this around and finally put an end to all the memes surrounding it.
• Empire of the Petal Throne was retroactively tainted by the discovery that creator M. A. R. Barker is the author of Serpent's Walk, a neo-Nazi novel written under a pseudonym and published in 1991.

Theatre

• Among William Shakespeare's works, the most polarizing in modern times are The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, which are well known for their notoriously unflattering depictions of women and Jews, respectively. Modern productions of both typically add some sort of twist to reduce the uncomfortableness, up to and including staging the plays, originally intended to be comedies, as tragedies with the female and Jewish characters as Doomed Moral Victors. Even within Shakespeare's own lifetime, there was a Take That! play called The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed where Katherine's abuser Petruchio gets a taste of his own medicine from his next wife Maria. Titus Andronicus is also well-known for being an extremely dark and violent Evil Versus Evil revenge tragedy very much unlike any of the Bard's other works, including cannibalism and the only rape scene he ever wrote.
• The mid-Victorian play Our American Cousin would forever be remembered for the Lincoln assassination instead of the witty characters like Lord Dundreary. The fatal shot was actually timed to what was famously the play's funniest moment, in the hope that the roar of laughter would cover the noise of the gunshot. In addition, John Wilkes Booth was a well known and critically acclaimed stage actor at the time. Nowadays, he's only remembered, obviously not without reason, as one of the most notorious criminals in American history. On top of all that Ford Theater is now known only as the place where Lincoln was shot, to the point that one may get the impression it was built solely so Honest Abe could be shot in it.
• While The Rite of Spring is cherished for its avant-garde music and choreography, its premiere night in 1913 sparked a near-riot inside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris when the audience turned against each other on whether it was groundbreaking or sheer crap, with the latter throwing stuff at the orchestra and the dancers. It didn't help that inside the curtain, the composer and lead choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky had cooperation issues during the production. You might say that the premiere night had been a near-literal Broken Base.
• Nord-Ost, a Russian musical, is better remembered as the target of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis than as a work in itself.
• Theater director Julie Taymor won the Best Musical Tony for her adaptation of The Lion King, has adapted Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, made a foray into film with the Cult Classic Beatles tribute Across the Universe (2007), and throughout all her work has received acclaim for her use of elaborate costumes and puppets. What's she best known for these days? Her major mishandling of her Spider-Man adaptation Turn Off the Dark, which was plagued by, in addition to bad writing and prima donna antics by Taymor herself, numerous accidents involving the aforementioned elaborate props and costumes, some of which even resulted in serious injuries. In the end, she was unceremoniously given the boot from her own show and has done little of note since.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies, the twenty-years-later follow-up to his smash hit The Phantom of the Opera, was never able to rise above the stigma of being a sequel that nobody but Lloyd Webber himself really wanted. It was based on a poorly regarded Fan Sequel novel called The Phantom of Manhattan and contained cliches that have appeared in fan works of dubious quality for decades, including Christine giving birth to the Phantom's illegitimate child after a one-night stand and deciding he was her true love after all, and her kindly love interest Raoul having become a neglectful drunkard who's blown his fortune at the gambling table. All of this resulted in considerable fan opposition before it even came out (including a Twitter campaign called #LoveShouldDie) and a general sense that the show was Lloyd Webber's terrible Draco in Leather Pants fanfic that he forced onto the stage with his piles of money, and despite having the Phantom name and Lloyd Webber's own behind it, the initial run received mediocre reviews and closed at a loss — though the show later picked up a cult following in Australia, where a more polished production was staged and filmed.
• Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was sued months before its debut by Harper Lee's estate, who accused it of straying too far from the source material against Lee's instructions from her will. This includes some already controversial elements from Go Set a Watchman like Atticus having some racist leanings, and with Sorkin himself already being such a polarizing figure, the show has quite a hole to dig itself out of.
• While Carousel has several individual songs that have become classics, such as "If I Loved You" and "You'll Never Walk Alone", if you haven't seen it yourself, most likely the only thing you know about the actual plot is its extreme level of Values Dissonance: the main character is a sympathetically-portrayed wife-beater, and the play includes a scene where his wife defends his actions.
• Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues is still a very popular play, but the vignette "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" is best known for its highly controversial depiction of an underaged girl's sexual encounter with an adult woman. The segment has become rather infamous for driving many theatre groups to rework it to avoid alienating the audience; some productions change the narrator's age from 13 to 16, others have omitted the controversial line "If it was rape, it was a good rape", and still others have elected to cut the entire segment.
• The only real impact left by the play All in a Row is the outrage it caused for having an autistic character portrayed by a creepy puppet contrasting a cast full of humans.
• Annie Get Your Gun is another one now known almost entirely for its Values Dissonance. It was created at the end of World War II specifically to encourage women who'd joined the workforce while their husbands were fighting the Axis to go back and Stay in the Kitchen, and thus reworks the true story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley to have her future husband Frank Butler refuse to be with a woman who's a better shot than him, so she ends up throwing a contest between them and retiring, when in real life it was actually Butler who gave up his sharpshooting career to support hers. It also features some horrific portrayals of Native Americans, with the reveal that they're not just mindless savages intended to be played for surprise laughs, and the song "I'm an Indian, Too" which brutally mocks their naming style. A 1999 revival heavily revised it to fit contemporary attitudes, cutting the insulting Native material and having Butler catch on to what Annie's doing and throw his own shots to end the contest with a tie.
• The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera about the murder of Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Italian passenger liner MS Achille Lauro, is better known for accusations of being anti-Semitic and/or too sympathetic to the hijackers than for its actual content.
• Much of the talk about Ivo Van Hove's 2019 revival of West Side Story revolved around the casting of a sex offender, Amar Ramasar as Bernardo, not even a year after being (temporarily) fired from City Ballet for his offenses. The changes to the story and staging were also controversial, but most reviews also mention Bernardo's casting (especially regarding a graphic Rape as Drama scene) since it attracted numerous protests during the show's short run. The revivial did not reopen after the COVID-19 pandemic, likely due in part to all the bad press. Ramasar himself announced retirement in 2021 due to how the controversy overshadowed his career.

Theme Parks

• It's impossible to talk about the infamous New Jersey theme park Action Park without mentioning its numerous safety hazards, which resulted in hundreds of injuries and six deaths. Problems included poorly designed and maintained rides, untrained teenage employees, terrible communication with its (often non-English speaking) visitors, lax safety rules, and high levels of drunkenness among both staff and riders. Its abysmal safety record led to the park gaining the nicknames "Traction Park", "Accident Park", and "Class Action Park". Case in point: Action Park's most notorious ride was Cannonball Loop◊, a water slide with a complete vertical loop built into it. Crash test dummies sent down the slide supposedly came out the other end decapitated and dismembered. Nevertheless, the slide remained operational for a whole month.
• It's become very difficult to discuss anything pertaining to SeaWorld due to the massive controversy surrounding the orcas and the Blackfish documentary that only worsened said controversy. Things have gotten slightly better following SeaWorld announcing the termination of the orca breeding programs, but some grievances still remain.
• Marineland Canada is a marine mammal park similar to SeaWorld owned by the Holer family in Niagara Falls, Ontario, known for its "Everyone Loves Marineland" advertising jingles played throughout Southern Ontario and Western New York, even having a commercial with that jingle dating from 1998 still airing to this day. However, thanks to a Toronto Star exposé published in 2012, it's now infamous for allegations of severe animal cruelty against several of their captive species. Even before the exposé, animal rights activists had protested against the park's treatment of its animals, but this controversy caused attendance to the park to drop and the Holer family to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Star for defamation. Since the death of founder John Holer in 2018, the park has shifted their focus from the animal exhibits to the rides. The Walrus and the Whistleblower, a CBC documentary released in 2020, elaborates upon this controversy, telling the story of how former Marineland trainer Phil Demers chronicled all the animal abuse that happened in the park.
• The Schlitterbahn water park chain experienced controversy in August 2016 after the death by decapitation of a ten-year-old boy (the son of a local politician) on the tallest waterslide in the world (called "Verrückt") at its Kansas City location, thus leading to the permanent shutdown of the slide. But it got worse after an indictment of park higher-ups was released in 2018. It implied that the slide's designer had no official engineering degree, the ride was known to be dangerous well before the fatality happened, and it was intentionally kept that way so the park could chase money from TV networks regarding their record-breaking attraction. Schlitterbahn Kansas City closed in 2018.
• Alton Towers:
  • The Smiler holds the world record for the most inversions in a rollercoaster, a staggering 14, but is more remembered for a devastating crash that happened in 2015 which led to multiple injuries and two leg amputations as a result. Even when the ride reopened the following year, with far more safety checks in place to make sure another crash wouldn't occur, many kept on referencing the crash when discussing the rollercoaster.
  • Th13teen opened with the world's first vertical freefall drop, on which the track and train freefall approximately five metres in darkness. What is it best known for? A case of false advertising on Alton Towers' part, with the coaster's pre-opening hype claiming it would be the scariest rollercoaster of all time, along with a range of promotional stunts that included suggesting that guests would need to sign a waiver to ride it or that it was a new type of ride known as a "psychoaster", only for it to turn out to be a family coaster with a single neat surprise element. Even after the ride's reception warmed with time, many kept on bringing up the false advertising within its marketing campaign whenever the coaster is discussed.
• Disney Theme Parks:
  • For a very long time, Disneyland Paris (or "Euro Disney" as it was originally known) was, unfortunately, most known in and outside of the Disney fandom for having an absolutely disastrous opening year to the point of directly affecting almost all of Disney's other theme park plans for the next two decades, as well as being absolutely despised by the French people at first for a number of reasons, mainly strongly opposing its poor (by French standards) working conditions and viewing it as an example of American cultural imperialism. The resort has been steadily recovering ever since the addition of Space Mountain: De La Terre À La Lune in 1995, but had only just recently been able to turn a consistent profit after the Walt Disney Company made some adjustments to its management after buying back all of their shares in it. Regardless of how well the resort does in the future, it's doubtful that mainstream pop culture will be willing to let Disney forget about those troubled first years any time soon, especially after being the subject of many jokes at Disney's expense.
  • A big part of why Stitch's Great Escape! got so much backlash was because it controversially replaced the much-beloved Cult Classic ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Even now, after the ride's permanent closure and dismantling, discussions of the ride are often focused on that fact.
  • It is impossible to discuss the Disneyland attraction America Sings without bringing up the death of 18-year-old hostess Deborah Gail Stone. Nine days after it opened in 1974, Stone was caught between a rotating wall and stationary wall and was crushed. The attraction was temporarily closed and modified to prevent further accidents. America Sings would continue to operate without further major incidents until it was permanently closed in 1988, but a shroud of morbidity still hangs over it to this day.
  • Habit Heroes at Epcot has been mainly overshadowed by its Unfortunate Implications and the negative reception it endured, which led to the attraction's closure and Disney to not develop any further Epcot attractions not tied to existing IPs in the process.
  • The short-lived "Journey Into Your Imagination" Retool of "Journey Into Imagination" is far more well-known for the negative reception it received from fans of the original incarnation and its myriad of widely-disliked changes. The ride was later reworked further into the better-received "Journey Into Imagination With Figment," but some controversial changes (such as the shorter ride length and overall lower-quality theming) still remain.
• Now-defunct Christian theme park Heritage USA, which was built and owned by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is now known largely for two things: that time Jerry Falwell went down one of its water slides while wearing a suit, and the fact that some of the money used to build it was collected from members of the Bakkers' audience under the pretense of funding overseas missions.
• The Mindbender, a rollercoaster at the West Edmonton Mall's Galaxyland Amusement Park, holds the record for the tallest, fastest, and longest indoor rollercoaster in the world. Despite that, most people know about it because of an accident in June 1986 where a derailed car crashed into a concrete pillar, killing three of its four passengers and seriously injuring the fourth.
• RollOver, an attraction at Norwegian amusement park Tusenfryd, is mostly remembered for being involved in the park's worst accident after a wheelchair user fell out of it and was injured. While a subsequent investigation revealed that there was nothing wrong with the attraction, guests still fled from it, contributing to its closure two years later.

Toys

• My Friend Cayla, and by extension all Internet of Things toys, had their reputation destroyed when security experts noticed a glaring flaw with the toys — that is, they had nothing to prevent the toys from being hacked. With no safeguards in place, a malicious party could commandeer a Cayla (itself a Bluetooth speaker in the form of a doll) and make her say nasty things or listen in on children's conversations. The manufacturers were quick to state that all hacking incidents took place in proof-of-concept demonstrations, and it requires people with the know-how to do so (not that a determined creep couldn't do it), but the reputation of the toys was completely tarnished. Additionally, the audio advertising and data collection by the dolls caused another controversy by parent groups who were uncomfortable with their children being monitored 24/7. Now, whenever the doll is brought up, it's always in relation to one or both of these controversies.
• Sky Dancers were popular dolls at the time, but now they're more well-known for causing injuries when used improperly, which resulted in the toys being recalled 5 years after their release. When Play Along re-released the toys four years later, safety instructions were printed on the box to prevent any similar incidents from occurring.
• The Entertech line of water guns boasted "The look! The feel! The sound, so real!" on their commercials, in reference to its close resemblance to actual firearms, on top of them being far more powerful than the cheap hand-powered squirt guns played by children. While not the first toy guns to closely replicate their real-life counterparts, this selling point led to its downfall, thanks to highly publicized incidents of children getting shot and killed by police officers who mistook the Entertech toys for actual guns, as well as real criminals utilizing Entertech guns in bank robberies. This led legislators to impose stricter rules on the manufacture and sale of toy weapons, specifically the Federal Toy Gun Law requiring them to be visually distinct from real guns by giving them a blaze orange color. This controversy spilled over to the NES Zapper, which while made to more closely resemble a Star Wars-esque futuristic blaster gun than an actual pistol to begin with when it was first released to coincide with the NES's North American debut in 1985, was re-released in 1989 with an orange color scheme to comply with federal gun safety laws.
• If anyone brings up lawn darts, chances are it's to bring up the many people who were injured or even killed by them, which resulted them being banned in the United States and Canada.
• Teen Talk Barbie was a doll that had a whopping 270 phrases recorded, with each doll including four selected at random. Of all these phrases, the only one most people know is "Math class is tough!", due to accusations of discouraging girls from pursuing education in mathematics. In response to the controversy, Mattel removed the line from the pool, and offered to exchange any doll that had it.

Web Animation

• Regarding the flash series Madness Combat created by Matt 'Krinkels' Jolly:
  • It's hard to discuss Cethic, creator and collaborator of both multiple fan projects and her involvement as an artist in the main series, without talking about her being accused of, and later confessing to, being a chronic emotional and sexual abuser and zoophile. The majority of discussion about her revolves around her actions, and it's hard to find any resource talking about her without also mentioning her allegations, although this may have something to do with her being kicked from the main series (along with Fleetwire) and all fan projects, most notably Green Pepper Studios, and seemingly retiring from Madness-related works indefinitely.
  • Fleetwire (real name Corey McKenna), is best known both for the song 'Eidolon Step' from DedmosRebuilt.fla, and for being exposed as a groomer and a zoophile by the aforementioned Cethic, and subsequently being kicked from his musician role on the series and deleting all social media.
  • If you don't know Danish fan animator Kelzad from either his REALM series or contributing the head sprites of Scrapeface for the 'An Experiment' episode of the main series, you either know him from being accused by fellow fan animator Kryy of concept theft from the non-canon Incidents side-series, or his immature Discord outburst over Green Pepper Studios, and by extension, himself, being denied an administrative role on the MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 Discord server over the moderators of the game's Steam community page, with the community being quick to label him as an outright manchild and his creator page on the MC Tributes Wiki having more information on his controversies than his past as an animator.
  • It's also hard to have a discussion on the wider Madness Combat fandom without bringing up its reputation as being one of the more extreme examples of The Law of Fan Jackassery on the internet, with a plethora of animators in the community engaging in egotistical behavior, petty rivalries between other creators, stealing of concepts, and prevalent gatekeeper mentality and hostility to 'outsiders' and a large Vocal Minority of purists who frown upon newer, more unconventional animators who do things differently from the established style. Not helping matters is that Krinkels himself admits he avoids addressing the drama out of concern it'll only cause more problems, and prefers to instead focus on putting out content.
• Super Mario 64 machinimist Starman3 was formerly revered for his influence on the early SM64 machinima community, most famously for founding The YouTube Rangers. However, his reputation started derailing in 2012 when accusations of pedophilia, control freak tendencies and victim blaming started coming forth from both random online users and his fellow SM64 machinimists which led to, among other things, his character being removed from fellow machinimist SMG4's Mario series. While he did eventually fess up and express a desire to change, he ultimately continued this behavior through the decade, with accusations flaring back up every year starting in 2017, carrying evidence from over 100 of his victims. This culminated in July 2020 when, at the height of the Smash community allegations, veteran SM64 machinimist MATTHEWGU4 posted a video further exposing his behavior. Most talk about him now centers on his bad behavior and absolute refusal to genuinely take responsibility and change, overshadowing any former influence and merit he and his channel had on the early SM64 machinima community.
• Lenstar Productions (real name Jacob Lenard) was an indie animator notable as the creator of various webtoons such as Mugman, Pike's Lagoon, and Loose Ends, all of which were famous for their Deranged Animation and surrealism. While he had already gained bit of a negative reputation for his prioritizing of style over substance (which some people found hypocritical given his deliberately amateur-ish art direction), Lenard's reputation took a nosedive in late 2020/early 2021 when many of his former peers came fourth detailing years of abusive treatment while working under him. Most notably repeated instances of homophobia and transphobia that led to the suicide attempt of one of Mugman's former voice actors. With the exception of his YouTube (where he disabled the comments for all his videos), Instagram and Discord accounts, Lenard deleted all his social media profiles shortly after the controversy struck.
• Animator Emily Youcis was always a polarizing figure, but was well known in some parts of the Internet (particularly the indie animation and horror scenes) for her Black Comedy and for creating Alfred's Playhouse. Nowadays she is best known for becoming an open neo-Nazi, which resulted in her losing her job and support from Troma.
• My Pingu TV, an Indian YouTube Kids' Channel featuring animated fairy tales, is mostly known for their video "Dina and the Prince", about an angel named Dina who is forbidden from speaking with the human prince she's fallen in love with, does so anyway, and is punished by being turned ugly. While this sounds fine on the surface, the channel decided to depict her "ugly" form with dark skin and curly hair, while her "beautiful" form had pale skin and straight hair. This led to claims that the video was teaching children to view black people as inherently unattractive, and a massive backlash ensued. While My Pingu TV took down the video and issued an apology, the channel remains better known for this video than any other they've uploaded.
• While CartoonMania was fairly divisive due to its stiff animation and hit-and-miss writing, the series still garnered a cult following due to its interesting premise of a cartoonist living with his own creations, in addition to the show's usage of slapstick humor and homages to popular cartoons such as Animaniacs and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The series' fanbase dissipated in the summer of 2020 when screencaps and other evidence of creator Matthew Littlemore drawing suggestive artwork of some of the series' underage characters (as well as acting perverted in general on Discord, even after others made it clear that they were uncomfortable) were revealed, on top of people coming forward with stories of emotional abuse at his hands. This led to many involved in the then-upcoming reboot to publicly cut ties with him, and Matthew himself deleted several of his social media accounts and labeled his YouTube channel as "inactive" (though Matthew would eventually return in February 2022), seemingly putting the show on permanent hiatus.
• The web animation series The Red Ape Family is best known for being a promotional tool for the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" line of NFTs, making it nearly impossible to discuss the show without getting into the highly controversial politics of the NFT market. It doesn't help that the show openly advertises its connection to NFTs, with its story containing blatant pro-NFT messages—making the connection nearly impossible to ignore, even if you watch the show without knowing its background.

Webcomics

• Whenever people discuss the Webtoon comic Boyfriends., chances are it'll almost always focus on the accusations of the comic playing into stereotypes of homosexual men (despite author Refrainbow being a gay man himself) and the allegations of racism and anti-semitism against Refrainbow when certain comments he made in the past were brought to light.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del:
  • The webcomic is more well known for the "Loss" (or "CADbortion") arc which is legendary for its Memetic Mutation and Mood Whiplash and writer Tim Buckley's online behavior than anything else. What really makes this moment awful is that Buckley used a similar traumatic experience that an ex-girlfriend suffered as the basis for "Loss", all while showing her no compassion and calling her "toxic". Accusations of being a Penny Arcade knockoff haven't helped and likely played a part in the comic's Retool.
  • It is also known for an incident in which Buckley had a fan animation taken down, made a response that outright insulted the creator, and threatened to sue them, despite previously saying he was okay with fan works. This move was widely criticized, especially after the ill-regarded Animated Adaptation. Not helping matters was Buckley's frequent use of copyrighted characters in the comic.
• The Sonic webcomic Other M, once extremely popular, now is mostly remembered for being written by future Archie Sonic writer Ian Flynn, and for having one of the villains be Knuckles, who is portrayed as an Absolute Xenophobe. This move received much scorn and has overshadowed every other plot element, including the fact that it takes place in an Alternate Universe, and that Knuckles being this kind of villain was intended as a sign of things being very wrong with said universe. The basic premise was revisited in Archie Sonic's Dark Mobius arc, where it was better received. For what it's worth, even Ian Flynn himself considers the webcomic an Old Shame.

• Sinfest was initially popular for its raunchy, dark comedy and its lighthearted parodies of religious tropes. When the Sisterhood/Patriarchy arc began in 2011, the comic suddenly became an Author Tract reflecting the author's trans-exclusionary radical feminist values, before slowly descending into support for alt-right movements. The comic is now more known for its author's radicalization than for the characters and storylines it had before.
• Dave Cheung is a manga artist who was originally famous as the author of Chugworth Academy, a fanservice comic centered around four teenagers attending the eponymous school. However, whenever his name gets brought up nowadays, it tends to be in the context of one or more of the following topics: a very clumsy attempt to tell people to stop demanding explicit material in Chugworth, posting an incredibly demeaning comic about video game developer Jade Raymond on his DeviantART page (which got taken down by the site mods due to its explicit content, prompting heavy backlash from Cheung himself), or the entirety of US Angel Corps, a murder-porn comic infamous for its deeply misogynistic overtones, graphic gory violence, and fetishization of rape, necrophilia, and abuse; while it was done primarily on commission, it was still Cheung's idea to begin with.
• Leasebound is a webcomic focusing on two lesbian women who, due to a lease mix-up, accidentally become roommates and eventually lovers. Initially praised for its open LGBT representation and relatability, the comic has since been overshadowed by allegations of transphobia against author RustyHearts following the release of its fourth chapter in February of 2019. Said chapter featured three characters being denied entry into a lesbian bar because they weren't considered "real women". RustyHearts's rather clumsy attempts at addressing these concerns have only added fuel to the fire.
• DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary and the NSFW sex toy / sex education site Oh Joy Sex Toy aren't respected by a lot of people due to controversial statements from artist Erika Moen. The most cited examples from the former are the "L.U.G." comic, where Erika describes herself as a "lesbian with an exception"^note she would later describe herself as simply "queer" and depicts her boyfriend casually using the word "dyke" and him and Erika expressing sexual desires towards a visibly displeased woman, and a comic where Erika openly admits to fetishizing trans men. While Erika has presumably changed her mind since DAR as Oh Joy tries very hard to be inclusive, the latter's features on certain controversial fetishes have made it a subject of disgust or mockery to many, especially the infamous comic on the cuckolding fetish.
• Once a hallmark of late 2000s/early 2010s Black Comedy webcomics, pictures for sad children is now better-known for (what appeared on the surface to be) the massive Creator Breakdown of its author, Simone Veil, who in 2014 forfeited on a Kickstarter intended to publish a print run of the series, uploaded a video of her burning copies of the print volumes (with threats to burn more if she continued to receive emails asking about the Kickstarter's rewards—though in reality, these were unsalable copies with printing errors and the like), shutting down the comic's website, and filing DMCA notices against anyone who tries to re-upload strips from the series. This literal Torch the Franchise and Run approach became such a defining element of the webcomic's reputation that its article on Know Your Meme ^note which, fair warning, was written before Veil came out as trans and consequently uses her former name features a still from the book burning video as its icon. This InputMag interview with Veil sheds some more light on the situation.
• Ask anyone who knows about Draconia Chronicles, and one of the first things they'll likely bring up is how the first chapter of the story revolved around an Earth Dragon named Gaia suffering a brutal Trauma Conga Line before being unceremoniously killed off in a fight between Scyde and Elektra's groups. While Anyone Can Die is in full effect in this series, the sheer senselessness and cynicism of Gaia's death tainted the comic for many, especially after a rumor began circulating that she had been based off the author's ex-girlfriend he had a messy breakup with (though this was never actually proven).
• If you've heard of El Goonish Shive outside of TV Tropes, it's probably in connection with the continued allegations of biphobia made towards its creator Dan Shive.
• Mallorie Jessica Udischas was originally famous as the author of Manic Pixie Nightmare Girls, which centered around the daily life of a trans woman as she struggled living in Seattle. However, beginning in 2020, she became better remembered for creating comics allegedly supporting shoplifting (which she attempted to defend by stating all of her art supplies she had as a teenager were acquired through stealing) and stealing the possessions of people you dislike - which was a semi-subtle jab at PewDiePie's then-recent home burglary - and the memes both comics inspired.
• Post-2019 discussions of Erfworld are more likely to involve the comic's sudden termination and the lingering controversies over the cause of the Creator Breakdown that ensued, rather than the interesting implications of what is effectively an RPG Mechanics 'Verse Isekai. The official reason is 'family tragedies.'
• Discussion about Homestuck^2, and by extension its predecessor Homestuck (especially after 2019), will almost always shift towards the controversial decisions made regarding the epilogue, the fact that much of Homestuck^2's content is/was locked behind a Patreon paywall, barely-existent communication between the authors and fans (including the news that Andrew Hussie ceased work on the comic breaking a whole year after he had actually left), and the authors' poor responses to criticism, most infamously sending a legal threat towards Sarah Z after she made a video documenting the history of Homestuck that, by their own admission, they hadn't even watched.
• If Raine Dog is remembered for anything, it's the infamous page where the titular character kisses her young owner, and the follow up page where she is effectively mutilated under the guise of "spaying" ^note though she isn't anthropomorphic yet, she's portrayed as sentient from the start. When it went viral in 2016 the creator Dana Simpson had to address that the comic wasn't advocating for bestiality, and she considers it and the whole comic an Old Shame of hers.
• Grim Tales from Down Below, one of Bleedman's crossover comics, had a flashback early in its run revealing that, as a means of courting Grim, Mandy carried out 9/11. In real life, this was only a few years after the attacks, and so the wounds were still fresh for many of the people who called Bleedman out on using them so insensitively. Bleedman, in turn, responded to the criticism with enough hostility (including flat-out calling one person a "bitch") that he was suspended from deviantART for a time. There's a number of other ill-advised creative decisions, such as the romanticized incest between Grim Jr. and Minimandy, but the "Mandy caused 9/11" incident remains at the forefront even to this day.
• I Will Survive, a Zootopia comic, is mostly known for the infamy surrounding it. The comic featured Judy Hopps finding out that she's pregnant with Nick's child but decides she doesn't want the baby. Nick, on the other hand, objects and tries to convince Judy to keep the baby, which leads to a violent argument between the two and eventually their breakup. It quickly became a laughingstock among people for how blatantly out-of-character it portrays the two and being over-the-top with the melodrama. Borba intended to show how even a One True Pairing like WildeHopps can fall apart. However, because he chose an unwanted pregnancy and Judy wanting to terminate it as the reason for their breakup, the comic drew hordes of pro-life and pro-choice commentators who cared little for the characters and focused obsessively on the potential abortion, even though the comic tried to avoid taking a side. As such he is prominently remembered as the guy who wrote the "Zootopia abortion comic" even though he has done a lot of other things besides it.

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