Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things

"The people on the Internet who complain about the show were going to hate it no matter what I did, so I don't really care about their opinions."

— Seiji Mizushima, director of Mobile Suit Gundam 00

Someone who is involved in the production of a work is known for interacting with the fans. For example, they take some time writing a production blog or answering fandom's questions, or regularly appear at conventions.

All of a sudden, this person stops doing so because some fans become so thick and heavy (and ugly) that this previously fun activity has become a burden and is no longer enjoyable.

The fans complain to and about the creator, hassle them to an unbearable level, constantly ask questions that the creator has already stated they will not be answering, and generally do obnoxious things in the name of their fandom. Complaints often arise from Schedule Slip. For example, it's been pointed out that very few people who make webcomics are making money from their craft; most of them are doing it as a hobby. When things in real life pop up, such as health issues, it's always the webcomic that has to go first.

Making matters worse, this can sometimes result in an Internet Counterattack and Complaining About Complaining. In some cases, this tends to induce Artist Disillusionment, ending in a "take that!" statement from the author to the fanbase within the work, sometimes in the presence of a Straw Fan. If it proceeds beyond that, it can ultimately end in the author simply quitting the whole work, and in extreme cases retiring from writing altogether.

This is Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things.

Related to Dear Negative Reader, Writer Revolt, and Someone Ruins It for Everyone. Common scenarios that can lead to this include Trolling, Flame Wars, Unpleasable Fanbase, Internet Backdraft, Ship-to-Ship Combat, Rule 34 – Creator Reactions, Video Game Perversity Potential, Disproportionate Retribution, Fan Dumb, and Hate Dumb. Be Careful What You Wish For is often invoked. One of the many results of G.I.F.T. Contrast Role-Ending Misdemeanor, for when it's the creators' own misbehavior causing problems and leading to cut privileges.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Akira Ishida (who voiced Xellos in Slayers Next, Kaworu Nagisa in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and many other roles) stopped recording character image songs, and publicly singing in general, after one too many fan complaints about his singing voice.
Tite Kubo ran a really funny Twitter account whereupon he confirmed the image the Bleach fandom has of his real life self. Then someone had the bright idea to blithely congratulate him on chapter 400 before it was even released in Japan. Ultimately, in September 2015, Kubo suddenly left Twitter, his final message proclaiming, "[Notice] Tomorrow night, after about 24 hours I will delete my Twitter account. Until that time, please direct message me." It turns out that someone on Twitter had been passing photos across the Internet proclaiming to be that of Kubo with Weekly Shōnen Jump proclaiming that these were fake and that they would pursue legal actions if this was being done maliciously.
Takami Akai, one of the founders of Studio Gainax, ended up leaving the company after having addressed so many complaints about the Off-Model animation in episode four of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. In his own words, reading these comments was "like putting [his] face next to an anus and breathing deeply."
Suehiro Maruo once let slip he avoids unpaid appearances in fear of expecting this result.
While voice actor Vic Mignogna does his best to be friendly and open with the fans, he has stated that he won't be doing Edward Elric "short rants" or saying "Colonel Mustang looks dead sexy... in a miniskirt!" on request anymore because it was getting old.
Following the disruption of a Hyperdimension Neptunia the Animation screening by a psycho with a knife attacking Rie Tanaka, Chiyomaru Shikura, the president of 5pb., issued this statement:
Regarding the Neptunia incident. My staff and I have been talking, and there seems to be a need to rethink how events will be held. This of course includes having security guards and having more of a feeling of distance between the talent and their fans. It's really a shame.
Hikaru Midorikawa put his blog on indefinite hiatus after people spotted a female fan with an accessory that Midorikawa himself had, making them think that he was cheating on his wife and attacked her. Turns out the accessory was something he introduced on his blog.
Mika Yamamori, the creator of Daytime Shooting Star, used to respond to fans on Twitter but has since then been reluctant to reply to any comments unless she feels they are important to her readers. The problem mainly came from two incidents: the first problem was when she discovered that the reason why she had so many international fans respond to her was because of unofficial translations when a fan commented on Chapter 69 before Margaret, the magazine that published Daytime Shooting Star, went on sale in Japan. The second problem was the massive Ship-to-Ship Combat as the series was concluding, where international fans kept leaving very heated comments on her Twitter account. The pressure got to the point where she had to put it on private until the final chapter was published. Today, she rarely responds to her fans, especially if the comments are not in Japanese.
Shaman King is considered one of the better dubs that 4Kids Entertainment produced, since the series wasn't Bowdlerised as much as other works that 4Kids had under their umbrella. However, since Shaman King revolves around death and features heavy violence, it also attracted ire from Moral Guardians at the time. Coupled with having a bad timeslot and the company's negative reputation, the show flopped in the United States, and is ultimately what led 4Kids to continue their usual censorship and localization practices for future dubs.^note Hilariously enough, this show has been released in Latin America by Televix Entertainment prior to 4Kids in USA, and both companies coincidentally used to work together in sublicensing shows in Latin America. In contrast, Shaman King aired uncut in LA directly from the Japanese masters, however they still managed to broadcast other titles later under 4Kids with the same Bowdlerization as ever.
Shotaro Tokunou, the creator of New Game!, has stated that he will no longer respond to fan letters because some fans have resold fancy paper boards that he had specially drawn and sent after receiving letters. Those paper boards were being raffled around at online auctions.
Due to manga having a reputation for being frequent targets for theft, Barnes & Noble responded by putting sensor tags, the ones usually reserved for electronics, inside the back cover. Anyone who buys these then faces the tough decision of keeping them in with the annoying added thickness, or try and remove them and risk ripping the page. Then you get the loiterers who treat said manga section as a library and throw the books on the floor after they're done damaging the merchandise for actual customers. As such, a different form of security tag are specifically used, which has a minimal risk of damaging the book itself.
Chainsaw Man had an oft-profane and politically incorrect Brazilian scanlation become popular before the manga was officially released. Seeing the crass version of "THE FUTURE IS BEST!"^note not appear in the dub led to fans of this version harrassing Guilherme Briggs, whose character said that line, and ultimately making him quit social media and leave the character for good. Note that he wasn't even involved in the translation (or even directed the voices) of the show, he just voiced the character and that's it.
In December of 2024, an artist on X, formerly Twitter, by the name of Lynn6Thorex drew fanart of the main protagonists of Dan Da Dan, Okarun and Momo, as black teenagers. Okarun's English dub voice actor A.J. Beckles took notice and temporarily made it his profile picture as well as his girlfriend, fellow voice actor Anairis Quiñones. However, the art in question caused politically and racially charged Flame Wars over race swapping in fanart and this led to his past tweets regarding the race of voice actors matching or not matching characters being brought to light. Since Beckles was a lead voice actor, he was caught in the crossfire and became the victim of racist harassment by a Vocal Minority, leading him to deactivate his account. This controversy spread to Japanese Twitter, where Japanese users accused AJ Beckles of being racist and supporting Okarun's race-swapping on the basis of him viewing the Japanese as inferior, with a viral thread calling for his resignation.

Comic Books

This story from Mark Waid (it begins about halfway down the page). He did a phone interview with a Vermont radio station and, after the interview was done, was invited by one of the interviewers to visit their comic shop in Vermont for a signing and meet-and-greet with the fans. Waid agreed, only to discover they did not actually have a comic shop and just wanted him to visit them. He likens it to the movie Misery and explains that he has warned all his fellow authors to be wary and make sure they are not deceived by the same fans. He does not say anything about never meeting fans again, but you can bet he is a lot more hesitant about it.
Alan Moore is said to have stopped attending comic conventions because some fans at a United Kingdom Comic Art Convention followed him into the washroom to seek his autograph.
The early 2011 comments shutdown at the blog The Source at DCUniverse was the direct result of a flame war about who was faster: Superman or The Flash.
Fred Perry went on a short hiatus after a rabid fan pushed an old lady and her grandson out of the way and threw down some cheesecake when he tried to deny he "took commissions for that sort of thing".
Grant Morrison mentions in their memoir/history of superheroes Supergods that they had to give up trying to interact with fans online due to various death threats made against them, their collaborators and their respective families by people who didn't like Batman RIP.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) has seen head writer Ian Flynn having to deal with real-life troubles around the comic by closing them off more than once.
- Ship-to-Ship Combat, along with Executive Meddling in several areas, is what convinced comic writer Ian Flynn to permanently end any ideas of Sonic and Sally being a couple when the comic was rebooted. Flynn just couldn't take the shipper comments anymore.
- Ken Penders became the anti-Christ in the fandom's eyes when Penders sued Archie for rights to characters that he created within the comic. The fandom started throwing multiple insults his way, which also didn't go over well with Flynn, since he felt it made everyone look bad. Flynn's official forum now bans somebody if they make any mention of Penders whatsoever because Flynn doesn't want any more trouble with it. This also killed a thread on Flynn's board talking about the Lara-Su Chronicles after fans went into a panic over a number of tweets from Penders which led them to think that Penders was trying to kill the Sonic comic outright. Penders' page on this very wiki has long since been permanently locked as a result.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) used to include background cameos of fan-made Original Characters as a little Fandom Nod. This was dropped after Annual 2014 included a cameo by a character created by an artist named Cutosphere, who was infamous among MLP fans for her open hatred of the Brony fandom, which caused a massive fandom meltdown that overshadowed everything else about the issue.
At San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, Faith Erin Hicks, writer for the Avatar: The Last Airbender comics, recalled an event where she got fan mail about Azula that, in her words, was "particularly psychotic." Combined with former writer Gene Luen Yang saying that some of Azula's fans were crazy to the point of scaring her away from trying to write for the character, and there's little hope for any extensive comic content about Azula.
A rare in-universe example comes from Transmetropolitan, where main character and gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem mentions that the final straw that led him to abandon his career, lock himself into a heavily fortified cabin in the wilderness and spend five years "... taking pot shots at fans and paparazzi, eating what I kill and bombing the unwary." was when a group of fans wrestled him to the ground in the street in an attempt to mug him for one of his internal organs. One wonders if this was self-referential on Warren Ellis' part.

Fan Works

The creator of The Reid Oliver Cartoon Saga, based on the popular As the World Turns character Reid Oliver, stopped making the cartoons shortly after the show ended because she found out someone else was profiting from her work and claiming it as their own. Pretty sad considering the actor playing Reid admitted that he had liked the cartoons he had seen.
The creator of Be the Sea Dweller Lowblood posted a poll to determine which character would be shown next, Vriska or Kanaya. Both options were tied for quite a while, then Vriska suddenly took over. The creator decided foul play was involved, took neither popular option, and stopped using polls, declaring this:
"There is no way that many people have voted, MUCH LESS that it stayed that perfectly tied for so long, MUCH LESS that the votes suddenly jumped up for one side that much. I KNOW there were some people who voted specifically to make it balance out, rather than vote for what they actually WANTED. Some of y'all in here admitted that. Clearly, someone else is spamming Vriska now. Fuck this shit. You're not getting Vriska or Kanaya. You're especially not getting Vriska, since it's at least confirmable that there is somebody cheating in her favor, if not that there are folks cheating in both's favor... Way to go! We're never having a vote again."
Durandall once deleted Kyon: Big Damn Hero from FanFiction.Net, then left that site altogether, because of criticism (not of his work, but of himself) that he received from some users of the site. He later realized that this was excessive, apologized, and reuploaded the fic.
A variant of this happened with the hugely popular Kraith stories based on Star Trek: The Original Series. Jacqueline Lichtenberg, best known for her Sime Gen series, wanted readers to join in and contribute, as long as they stayed within the series guidelines. (yep, fan fiction with its own writers' guide). With Lichtenberg and other excellent writers at the helm, Kraith's depiction of Starfleet and especially Vulcan quickly displaced any other fan writer's concept^note and became "not only the major Vulcan series, with the major Vulcan universe," but "the accepted standard for Star Trek fandom." Seriously. Things were going well until Lichtenberg brought in Sondra Marshak as a Kraith Creator. Marshak's kinks soon came to dominate the project, and Lichtenberg, in awe of Marshak's "incredible mind", abandoned most of the plot plans for the second half of Kraith, which was never completed. But it wasn't just Marshak. Fan writers who wanted to add their own work to Kraith had to not just follow the Kraith Creators Manual but have their work vetted by an increasing number of Kraith Creators (including Marshak) through the Kraith Round Robin in which all the Creators would have a chance to read and comment (repeatedly) on your story. Lichtenberg's Marion Zimmer Bradley-esque belief that the only worthwhile story comments were "acid-tipped language, scathing rebukes and searing putdowns" couldn't have helped. And in those days, when you couldn't email and cc everyone, the bureaucracy of the stories was unbelievable.
"...sometimes a story would go through a cycle of fourteen people, a process that could take many, many months... Many stories were never finished due to the amount of time it took for approval. Sometimes the author was asked to make so many changes that she or he simply gave up on the story."
"...Their claim - their boast, even, stated in one editorial - was that some of their best stories had been rewritten enough that they told a completely different story from the one the writer had originally set out to tell!"
In 2015, CBS and Paramount gave a lawsuit towards the creators of Prelude to Axanar when it was revealed that the creators were actually profiting from the Star Trek name in the process of making the follow-up movie Star Trek: Axanar. The shoddy defense at first was "they didn't know what they were doing was wrong...because we had no Guidelines" So CBS and Paramount set up specific guidelines for making fan movies, effectively and permanently killing fan continuations and feature-length movies, and ending a decades long silent Gentleman's Agreement between CBS and fan-films. The guidelines state that all creators, actors and all other participants must genuinely and deliberately consist only of amateurs, can't be compensated for their services, and can't be currently and/or previously employed in any Star Trek media or any of CBS nor Paramount Pictures’ licensees. Crowdfunding is allowed... but it has a hard cap of $50000. The fan-films must also be up to 15 minutes long or in two parts that, when combined, cannot go beyond half an hour, with no follow-ups or remakes whatsoever, even if Star Trek is removed in the follow up or remake to try and cheat that rule. One known casualty is Star Trek: Renegades, which ended up stripping itself of all of its Star Trek connections and going fully original.
A controversy surrounding fan artist Zamii070 occurred when members of the Steven Universe fanbase harassed her for drawing the character Rose Quartz "too skinny", and also accused her of “cultural appropriation” for drawing a character resembling a Native American. It got much worse. At the time Zamii posted the "too skinny" art, Rose's true appearance had not yet been revealed. The harassment started after episodes showing her zaftig figure. The harassment was then leveled towards the actual show crew when they called the drawings "artistic interpretation" in an attempt to defuse the situation. Things eventually culminated in attempted suicide by Zamii070, but she survived and was hospitalized. Her harassers defended their actions by asking the show's creators and Rebecca Sugar's contemporaries leading questions about the nature of "True Art," in hopes that they would condone the harassment. They didn't, and the show's crew called out the rabid fans for taking this one piece of fan art way too far. The rabid fans also repeatedly stated that "Rose Quartz was never skinny." Rose Quartz may not have been, but her past self, Pink Diamond, has a slim, petite figure. In any case, it was also called out as a weak defense for trying to get a fan artist to kill herself, making the rabid fans look even worse.
In general, video game console homebrew/modding communities are perceived as hostile once a scene has grown big enough to attract the mainstream audience. Among many causes, one of them comes from people that lack understanding of the technicalities, follow dubious or out-of-date guides, ask questions without researching first, or the classic begging to be given help/services for free (often without thanks). It does not help that the idea of game modding or piracy especially attracts children who tend to be not quite bright in this topic and are the easiest to risk bans/bricking. This worry over an expensive loss among other problems (and these risks are the very thing modders/homebrewers have tried very hard to avert) is what justifies the rudeness. This also goes for individual Game Mods, more so if the game is multiplatform, which easily invites entitled requests for mods for one platform to be usable on another. For specific examples:
- Zolika, known for trainers for various PC games, had quit modding entirely due to a combination of Mis-blamed and invoked Condemned by History by people wrongly accusing his tools of being malware, leaking personal information, etc. going back to the days of Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer years ago, not helped by sockpuppetry of the rumor spreader and a full attempt of copying his code wholesale to discredit him. This resulted in all his game mods to be abandonware, though several received a final update before he did quit. Full story here.
- The reason that the development of reliable modding tools for Mario Kart 8 (and Deluxe) is stalled is because of tons of low-effort mods or unreasonable requests that only contribute some cheap YouTube montages to that game's modding community. These are dubbed "meme mods"^note and are generally loathed by the community, with those who are fine with such mods only accepting them if it's apparent that a lot of work was put into it.
- A (now former) member of the Persona modding community, pioziomgames, made much of his mod creations and tools private, only allowing other people to republish them if he trusted them. Even then, not all apply. The reason for this is pioziomgames' hate of the fandom. This naturally frustrated other modders that were looking forward to his tools, like his (closed-source) model editor.
- In some fandoms, fans known for making high-quality game mods will refuse to make tutorials for making mods due to fears that the mod library will be filled with trash-quality mods. For instance, a popular modder for Miitopia, after receiving comments requesting a modding tutorial, has stated that they will not make a public-release tutorial for modding.
A number of people who rip models from licensed games with Frozen characters have concerns over pornographic works and the "Elsanna" fanship between protagonists Elsa and Anna (which is highly controversial, as it concerns an incestuous relationship between two sisters). As a result, these model rippers either put their rips under a restrictive license which prevents people from using the models in M-rated works or they keep the models entirely to themselves. While said models aren't even theirs in the first place and it's still possible for them to get a cease-and-desist, the restrictions are put in place largely because they don't want to risk attracting any more unnecessary attention from Disney's legal team with raunchy Frozen edits. Given the film's somewhat smeared reputation due to the rise of illicit depictions of children's characters, this is understandable.
The Little Foreigner: On January 25, 2021, the fic's original SpaceBattles.com thread was closed by a moderator after several people wrote posts insulting each other and the author and telling them to kill themselves. Fortunately, the fic's Sufficient Velocity.com thread is still open, and on February 2nd of that same year, the thread was reopened.
Raise Your Voice Against Liars: Co-writer Naruwitch permanently shelved the FanFiction.Net version of the story due to excessively toxic and homophobic reviews (the author went on record that she is not homosexual, but will not tolerate the reviews posted for the story). When the harassment continued even after it was discontinued, she abandoned the story entirely, handing it off to co-writer BeeTeeDubya14, who also brought in the help of DSpaceZ and BetterOffAlone. It then went further when the team Restricted the version on Archive Of Our Own so that only those with an account can even read the story, as the site otherwise allows anonymous comments.
The reason why popular fanfiction website Archive of Our Own has a limit of 75 tags that can be attached to a fic is because the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi fic Sexy Times with Wangxian had over 4000 tags attached to it^note, which caused issues with browsing and a lot of technical problems with the site.
The author of The Good Hunter removed the fanfic from FanFiction.Net to avoid drama that involved Kenkou Cross (the author of the Monster Girl Encyclopedia series) and MGE-related fanfics. As of now, it has been archived onto Fichub and uploaded to Archive of Our Own under the username SixtyThreeNineteen.
A Thing of Vikings: Due to constant harassment, the fic was outright deleted from Fanfiction.net (originally it was just going to be abandoned so that other people could find the story, but a large number of users descended on the comment section there to leave nasty and antisemitic messages, so the author deleted the story from the site in order to deny them the opportunity), and the version on Archive Of Our Own was accessible to registered site members only after a persistent alt-right user persisted in harassing the author after being told to go away. In late 2020, the story was cautiously opened back up to non-registered users again, but there are currently no plans to post anywhere else other than Archive of Our Own. After an additional round of harassment, however, the story was locked down again to only registered AO3 members as of January 2022.

Literature

Harlan Ellison's essay "Xenogenesis" (in the collection Edgeworks) is a catalog of harassment, mistreatment, larcenous behavior, and in some cases downright assault inflicted upon science fiction writers by their fans. Originally composed as a speech, compiled from letters he had requested from 80+ other authors, it illustrated that for every courteous and civil fan, there are dozens of scary creeps. Some writers had been so terrorized they wouldn't let Ellison use their names; one said that "attending conventions had thrown him so far off his writing that all he wanted to do was absent himself utterly from any access by fans to his life." It's a bit of a horror show that culminates in writer Alan Dean Foster's story about a disgruntled "fan" throwing a cup of warm vomit in Foster's face.
''As nervously as many writers sing the praises of their fans, do you begin to perceive; they're afraid of you, afraid of what you're capable of doing, as lark, as gag, as obsessive self-amusement... Or haven't you wondered why you never see Stephen King at conventions these days?..."
J. D. Salinger supposedly went Reclusive Artist, and supposedly kept writing but refused to let anyone see his work, partially because he was so peeved over the way popular culture took to a 'misreading' of The Catcher in the Rye.^note
Spider Robinson preempted this in the case of the alt.callahans Usenet group, an early virtual community based on his Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series. While he gave it his full blessing early on, mentioned (and hence promoted) it in a Callahan's story, and made the odd official contribution from time to time, this was always done offline and/or through third parties — if he has ever posted to the group, it was never under any alias that could have been penetrated. This careful policy probably owes something to the aftermath of Pyotr’s Story (published 1981), which was set on Callahan’s weekly riddle night, and ended with an invitation for readers to write in with answers to the unsolved riddles. Result: sackloads of mail. And while the flow did tail off, it has never ceased entirely. He's also publicly said that he's seriously worried that if he got involved with the alt.callahans, he'd spend too much time there when he should be writing more stories.
Stephenie Meyer had been planning a book called Midnight Sun, which was a re-telling of Twilight from Edward's perspective. She even posted the first chapter on her website, to whet fans' appetites. Then a half-finished manuscript appeared on the Internet, posted by someone she'd trusted enough to give a copy to. Meyer was so upset that she stated that the book was now "on hold indefinitely," because if she wrote it in her (then-)current state of mind, the evil vampire would succeed. After further delays caused by the publication of Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, the book would ultimately be released in August 2020.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was one of the first writers to run into this in regards to fanfiction. She used to edit occasional anthologies of what she thought were the best fanfics for her Darkover setting. There's a bit of confusion over what precisely happened, but at some point her reading those fanfics resulted in the cancellation of a novel set at the same time as one such fanfic. This has become a precedent for many authors to not even read fanfic.
Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde books weren't selling too well, and she was getting a lot of flak from certain pagan/Wiccan groups, so she stopped writing them. Cue the conspiracy theory people with bizarre speculations, such as believing that the Guardians were real. It got worse when Lackey started getting death threats from people at fan conventions, leading to Lackey posting a rant called "The Last Straw" where she lambasted fans who take her writing and the fandom around it way too seriously, fans assuming her writing is based on reality, and how it was unrealistic to assume that an author shouldn't be concerned with whether or not their books were making money.
Karen Traviss of Star Wars Legends fame/infamy had been involved with the fandom, but contention arose over her supposed establishment of the Grand Army of the Republic consisting at a mere three million clones for a galactic scale conflict. Some people took issue with it, which is reasonable, but those that did almost exclusively blamed her, which isn't. The result was a massive multi-board Flame War that included both sides insulting each other, hate sites, Dear Negative Reader posts, coining of derogatory nicknames for their detractors, accusations of favoritism/nepotism/sexual bribery, and ultimately culminated when one nutjob made a machinima video of himself brutally murdering a mock Traviss and her fans over his concern for the numbers (and disingenuously called it "satire"), which made the StarWars.com board moderators nuke everything associated with the... "discussion". What makes this entire debacle even worse is that if either side bothered to simply read the Attack of the Clones novelization, some of the bickering could have been avoided since (at the very least) her detractors wouldn't have put so much time and energy going after someone who, by their own admission, doesn't have the authority to make the changes they wanted.

Music

Trent Reznor declared he would stop most of his Twitter usage due to various unpleasant posted comments regarding his wife and how their collaborative new project was getting in the way of new Nine Inch Nails' projects. He still posts plenty of updates, but most of them tend to be news-related rather than personal now.
Yoshiki of X Japan was chased off the Internet for much of 2009 and half of 2010 in a massive flare of Internet Jerk and Internet Counterattack that originally started when he cancelled a planned concert in Paris. He came back to the Internet in 2010 on Facebook and Twitter, and is currently back but is still occasionally bothered by trolls.
The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. Part of it was the complexity of some post-Revolver tracks exceeded what could be performed live by four people. Part of it was boredom with repeatedly playing their (by that point) years-old set. And part of it was that their fans went so crazy whenever the Beatles showed up that they couldn't take it anymore. The Beatles were unable to hear themselves play their own instruments from all the screaming, were trapped in their hotel rooms by mobbing fans whenever they went anywhere, and had to be ferried around in armored cars to prevent being torn apart in the near-rioting that surrounded them. Another factor was the Christian Fundamentalist-driven anti-Beatles hysteria that emerged after John Lennon's alleged "we're Bigger Than Jesus" comments (which was a Beam Me Up, Scotty! ^note), complete with record burnings, boycotts, and picketing of Beatles concerts; these convinced the band that touring the U.S. wasn't worth it, as they'd just have the Moral Guardians dogging them at nearly every leg of the tour. John at this time confessed that his worst fear was someone shooting him. The last straw was probably an incident at a concert in Memphis where an audience member threw a firecracker on stage. No one was harmed, but for a split second everyone thought the loud noise was a gunshot. The Beatles performed just five more concerts after that.
Disturbed used to answer fan questions on message boards, spending the most of their time being badgered to prove who they were. The sad thing is, this was started by David Draiman with the other band members saying it wasn't worth trying till they eventually warmed up to the idea at David's urging. With the relationship soured, they'll probably never do this again.
This is the reason why most music-formatted radio stations no longer freely play song requests. This doesn't stop the frequent complaints of "you never play this song" coming from the listeners, but it is easier for the radio programmers and disc jockeys to ignore them, and just program what they want to play. That is, if there even are announcer-programmers or disc jockeys at the station. Much contemporary radio runs on station branding (e.g., "Jack FM") — a prepackaged format that is often automated and voice-tracked to sound local, yet another example of this. (This is why you no longer hear news, weather or traffic reports on contemporary music-formatted radio in the US.)
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats now destroys all his outtakes, the result of an (especially embarrassing) unreleased album being leaked. He also destroyed a planned EP due to repeated requests for illegal mp3s on his own forum.
Randy Blythe of Lamb of God explains why he had to deactivate his Twitter account. It came down heavily in part to this.
In the late '90s, while Nas was working on his album I Am...The Autobiography, a bunch of the tracks were leaked on the Internet. In response, he rewrote a great deal of the album in just a month. The fanbase generally believes that the finished album suffered because of this.
In April 2013, a disgruntled fan of Protest the Hero posted an angry rant about how he waited in line at their bus after a show for an autograph, only to have his paper returned before being told to go away. It seemed like typical out-of-touch rockstar behavior... that is, until the band posted the rest of the story. Essentially, the dude was a known autograph hunter whose modus operandi involved going up to bands, acting like he was a fan who just wanted a keepsake, getting autographs, and then turning around and selling the signed items on eBay. On top of that, Protest the Hero had been burned by this same guy before and were not going to fall for his act again. They also clarified that they had no problem giving autographs to people who genuinely just wanted keepsakes, but that they were not okay with autograph hunters. The band has since said that if they got burned enough, they would consider just not giving autographs at all.
Ringo Starr publicly refuses to sign autographs anymore because a lot of people have sold his autographs on eBay for huge prices.^note Roger Waters has also publicly lashed out at these "autograph collectors," though he still signs from time to time. Robert Fripp instituted a similar policy for the same reasons.
Zayn Malik, member of UK band One Direction, temporarily deactivated his Twitter account due to the hateful comments he received, in extreme cases being called a "terrorist".
In Chile, after an unexpectedly large Los Jaivas concert wrecked the Parque Forestal park it was hosted in, complete with 70 tons of garbage needing to be collected the next day, garbage cans set on fire, and an art theft in a nearby museum, it's safe to say there won't be anything else hosted there in quite a while.
The Tigers had all videotapes of a 1968 concert for NHK destroyed after fangirls went wild and caused several injuries and damage to the arena.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor's demo tape All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling was the holy grail of indie fans for years. It was limited to 33 cassettes, and the band refused to reissue it for ages due to how different it was from their usual work, making the chances of it resurfacing very unlikely. Despite this, in 2013, a Reddit user revealed that they had one of the tapes and that they were ready to rip and distribute it, uploading two tracks to confirm its authenticity. However, harassment from fans led them to shut down their account and disappear from the internet, causing the rest of the songs to remain in limbo until they got leaked on 4chan in 2022; the band finally reissued the album on Bandcamp after that.
Steam Powered Giraffe started reaching this point with their fans, growing more and more detached from them both in person and online. For a charming group of robot mimes who just wanted to entertain, and now get flak over anything from a gender change for a trans woman's comfort to a mustache intended as a joke, it's more than a little sad for longtime fans. Nothing like hearing a once-loving and optimistic band be entirely unsurprised at hearing about their fans sexually abusing each other. To quote Rabbit, "I lost faith long before you told me that."
Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater wrote the song "Never Enough" from the 2004 album Octavarium in response to the more rabid parts of the fan base who kept criticizing and complaining and asking for more and more without realizing that the band's members are humans with lives. Other than that, even though the albums tend to divide the fan base, this hasn't had any real ill effects on their relationship with the fans, though one could assume the "demanding and never happy" type of fan isn't liked much by them.
Trevor Strnad posted a rant on Facebook around the release of Everblack that decried the illegal downloading of their albums, stating that the fans weren't sticking it to the man by downloading their music but were instead hurting them, as they were in that spot where they were big enough to live off of their music without having to consider day jobs but were nowhere near big enough to be anything even resembling rich and that they needed physical sales to prove that they were still relevant and retain strong label sales; if album sales fell below expectations, the likelihood that the label would start to consider them "old news" would rise significantly and could jeopardize their chances of continuing to receive support from the label. The responses were predictable; plenty of people (many of them musicians) agreed with both the statement and the sentiment behind it, while others took it upon themselves to shower them with abuse and accuse them of being whiny, entitled rock stars who saw the fans as piggy banks and were just getting mad that they weren't yielding enough.
Area 11, while still fairly involved with their fandoms, used to be even more involved through the official Facebook fan group, being members of it (for admin purposes) and joining in with the general fun, posting memes and so on. This changed when a fan somehow worked out the email address of Sparkles*, spammed him and then did something which resulted in the hashtag "Kill Colin" being spread ^note. The band are no longer members of the group, but do still lurk there, so it's not as total a loss as it could have been.
The primary reason Neutral Milk Hotel stopped playing in the 1990s. Their fandom after On Avery Island grew rapidly, and given that their primary tour circuit was house shows and small venues, the band was often exposed to a lot of creepy art types that unnerved the members, especially frontman Jeff Mangum. This fanbase was so rabid that when the band toured for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the entire audience was already singing along to the lyrics (in 1997, when the Internet was still very young and there were few if any lyric databases), which unsettled Mangum to the point that he quit playing after that tour. When Mangum finally returned to performing — first as a solo act in 2011 and 2012 and then with a reunited Neutral Milk Hotel from 2013 to 2015 — he hid himself behind a cap and giant beard, so that he couldn't see the audience at all. He seems to be fine with hearing theaters sing along with his lyrics nowadays, though.
For a very long time, the Foo Fighters refused to play "Big Me" live, because whenever they did, they'd be pelted with Mentos, because its music video spoofed Mentos ads. They started playing it live again after their "Foozer" tour alongside Weezer in 2005-06, as Weezer covered it with great acclaim.
In 2018, a fanmade music video for Saint Pepsi's song "Enjoy Yourself" was taken down on YouTube for its use of footage from a McDonald's commercial featuring former mascot Mac Tonight, due to said character having become associated with racist parodies of rap songs and internet hate groups in general.
Neil Young has endured fans singing or clapping along, yelling requests and other nonsense for decades. But what really pisses him off is constant texting, tweeting, filming and talking, especially during acoustic solo shows. He's also stopped playing certain songs because he can't make himself heard over the rude fans. Neil adores new technology, but not during the show, please.
In the fall of 2013, Beneath the Massacre had their set cut short by the venue in what wound up being their last appearance in New York until 2020 due to many incidents of people crowd-killing, hate-moshing, and generally being inordinately violent in the pit towards non-participants. The band tried to get the venue to let them continue, but the venue declined, declared that the night was over, and told everyone who wasn't a member of the band to leave. Patrons who were there that night said that the crowd-killing was so out of control and people were getting so pissed off that the room felt like a powder keg, and it was likely a matter of minutes before the room erupted into an all-out brawl if the venue hadn't stepped in.
Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil disabled comments on his Instagram in October 2018 due to constant harassment from trolls regarding his weight gain.
Charli XCX's third studio album — years after her previous one, and coming off the hype of a series of EPs and mixtapes — was in production since 2015 and expected to be released sometime around 2018... and then in late 2017, her Google Drive was hacked, and over 200 files worth of demos and release-ready songs (as well as promotional artwork) came frolicking out into the internet. While the leaks were widely loved by fans, Charli was devastated, and when combined with label interference as a result of it, she decided to reboot the album into Charli, which would be released in 2019 containing all-new songs. Despite retaining pride in the leaked material, she's actively refused to release them legitimately as she considers them irreparably "tainted", with only a handful of songs managing to evade this principle.
This led to the (sort-of) breakup of LGBT Noise Pop duo Black Dresses in 2020. Their 2018 debut album, Wasteisolation, experienced retroactive buzz as popular lipsync fodder on TikTok among minors, something that already made the duo uncomfortable as the album was rooted in heavily personal themes, but it also led to many fans targeting the members individually for "pushing" such "inappropriate" material onto said demographic despite said demographic barely existing in 2018, let alone worth their time and consideration. During the band's announcement of their breakup, they cited the extended harassment towards co-founder Devi McCallion experienced as the reason why. While the two still produce music and have even released two albums under the Black Dresses name, they continue to insist that they haven't reunited, presumably to dispel attention as to not ignite yet another fiasco.
There was an incident at a Nirvana concert in Buenos Aires where all-girl band Calamity Jane, who was the opening act that night, was pelted with mud and booed off the stage because they were women. Kurt Cobain, a huge feminist, almost cancelled the show out of spite, but the band instead decided to punish the audience by refusing to play their hits, only playing their really deep cuts, and constantly teasing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" only to play a completely different song.
When Weezer's sophomore album Pinkerton was negatively received, the band went in a Lighter and Softer direction for their next album, only for Pinkerton to develop a cult following. Despite this, the band refused to make a proper follow-up to Pinkerton and relegated the album to only a song or two during live shows for years due to frontman Rivers Cuomo being traumatized by the initial negative reception and poor sales of the album.
Eminem:
- Eminem is an artist so known for Fan Dumb that he coined the ubiquitous slang word for a Loony Fan — a "stan", after his song "Stan" in which a fictional Loony Fan kills his girlfriend and then himself because Eminem won't respond to his letters. Eminem became a Reclusive Artist due to fan harassment so extreme that he couldn't even leave his house without being surrounded by security on all sides. His songs document fans hammering on his door all night, harassing him while using the toilet, and how it's impossible for him to so much as go to the store any more. One of these "fans" even tried to kill Eminem in 2020. He's stated that his fame makes it impossible for him to have relationships with women, because they fall in love with his public persona and not the real him. Eventually, he stopped writing about his personal life in his music, because doing so opened up his friends and family to harassment. While he's much happier now, much of Eminem's fandom hold that his reclusive lifestyle has prevented him from being able to write the kind of exposed, personal songs that made his early work so fascinating, leading to his later material more focused on style and technique than subject matter.
- The moral panic about his material, leading to him getting hassled by LGBT+ groups and conservatives at his concerts, was also a factor in Eminem's seclusion. While Eminem initially leaned into this on songs like "White America" where he discusses Moral Guardians throwing a fit about his music, it eventually got so extreme that he had to step back.
- Several songs intended for Eminem's album Encore leaked, forcing Eminem into the studio to record replacement tracks; most of these ended up being extremely silly in tone due to Eminem's philosophy of writing them very quickly via freestyling and a drug addiction he was in the grip of at the time. Encore is often considered his worst album.
- While Relapse got mixed reviews and a Best Rap Album Grammy, 50 Cent has said that the negative backlash from Eminem's fandom towards Relapse spooked him away from his original shock-rap style into a Pop Rap one which by now his fans usually consider far worse than the Relapse style. Fans have also suggested the negative response to Eminem's Revival has put him off making personal music showing his vulnerabilities, with his following music being mostly braggadocio and Hurricane of Puns showcases.
- Eminem's song "These Demons" references how his fans are constantly changing what they want from him, including requests that are hypocritical or outright impossible. He cites that people want him to change but not change, get angry without getting too angry, and to get older without aging. Em even says "They keep movin' the goalpost, don't they?" about how the standards he's expected to meet will never be met, in part because the standards keep changing.
XTC: "Dear God" already caused plenty of controversy when it was first released, but it grew worse after a deranged student who was an XTC fan held a faculty member hostage at knife-point at a high school and forced the school to play the song over its PA system.

Webcomics

This is a major problem for artists in the Furry Fandom. A constant source of trouble is an artist being driven out due to their art being stolen and/or reposted elsewhere without permission, used by AI art generators to train on their work without permission, and other people trying to take credit for their work. Many art sites try to help the artists out by putting those who ask on a "Do Not Post" list, but that's small comfort when most of these cases are followed up by backlash over the artist leaving, making a bad situation worse. Other times, artists have to stop taking commissions because such slots are immediately filled by people who wait all day for such posts, or people who turned out to be remarkably bad customers. As such, even popular artists can decide that the worst parts of the furry fandom are more trouble than it's worth, causing them to bolt from the scene.
S. E. Case, the creator/artist of Cheap Thrills, experienced Artist Disillusionment while she was in the middle of making the fourth chapter. The ensuing Schedule Slip resulted in a part of her readership making repeated and unrealistic demands for further updates to the comic that bordered on harassment. This caused S. E. to call them out on her FurAffinity page shortly before she abruptly stopped the strip altogether that December, confirming the cancellation on her Tumblr blog six months later. Five years later, S. E. re-emerged with a Continuity Reboot of the comic as Rigsby, WI, this time with the characters all in human form.
Tess Stone, the mind behind Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name, revealed a spoiler on the true nature of Ples Tibenoch to a select few fans, confident that they wouldn't go and spread it around the fandom. Unfortunately, those select few fans did indeed spoil it for everyone else, causing Tess Stone to be a lot more selective about what gets revealed early.
This is the reason why there are no more forums for VG Cats. In addition to endless requests for games to be parodied or mocked, the series' notorious Schedule Slip was a frequent target of forum posters, resulting in a ton of Flame Wars. Eventually, the creators and mods got sick of dealing with it all, and just permanently shut down the forum.invoked
Gunnerkrigg Court:
- Tom Siddell used to occasionally make GC-themed desktop wallpaper for the fans.^note When some fans complained that he wasn't also making widescreen versions of these pictures, he decided to stop altogether.
- Siddell also used to respond to reader's queries on a "Questions for Tom" thread on the Gunnerkrigg Court forum. He stopped, not so much because people asked the same questions, but rather because other readers would jump in and answer the questions themselves, making it a "Questions for Whoever Feels Like Answering" thread. He took his question-answering to a formspring account. However, when fans began repeatedly asking questions on topics he had stated he wasn't going to answer, and then getting combative over his not answering, Siddell deleted his formspring account. Fortunately, some months later, Siddell decided to give it another shot and reopened his formspring account.
While he permits it to be written, the author of Tales of the Questor makes it a deliberate policy to never, ever read fanfics of his comics, because he knows he would go mad from the desire to dive in and re-edit...
Ratfist: When political discussions in the Shout Box started turning into flame wars with every new page, Doug TenNapel disabled comments below the pages. However, this led to the creation of an off-site Ratfist forum.
It's been rumored the Flind arc of Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic was designed to introduce furry characters, then brutally murder them at the end of the plotline, as a result of constant questions about the strange lack of furry presence in a D&D comic. Outside of the minotaur and the sphynx, there's nobody who'd count as "furry", and it seems like it's going to stay that way.
Moon Over June artist Woc disabled commenting on her later strips. This change came quietly, but after a short story arc which was met with much criticism by the readers.
This was the reason why RPG World never got an ending as Ian Jones-Quartey was tired of fans complaining about the comic. Compounded with him being busy with his animation career and dwindling interest to draw the comic, Jones-Quartey abandoned it and never looked back. Despite this, he was content to leave the site running until it became a haven for an exceptionally rabid collective of trolls. When the trolls retaliated at Jones-Quartey's later input to the site, he took down the archive entirely. Thankfully, the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "A Hero's Fate" gave fans a proper closure to the webcomic.
Andrew Hussie has taken potshots at parts of the Homestuck fandom he doesn't like, as well as deconstructing some parts of fandom culture. This reached a climax with "trickster mode", a power-up like that gives the user candy-themed outfits, hyper-sugary personalities, and a Caucasian skin tone. Beforehand, Hussie had explained that the characters were "aracial" in that there was no canon race or skin color for any of them. This didn't appease the heated arguments between fans either calling each other out (and Hussie himself) as racist for refusing to accept characters as anything other than white, or people poking fun at them. In response, when one character turns another into a trickster, the line "So very... CAUCASIAN!" followed by an exaggerated Big "NO!" came up. Cue the fandom going up in flames with people reading the joke as a Take That! towards everyone who had non-white headcanons, and using it as a means to harass those fans. So much so that Hussie redacted the joke, the first time he'd ever done so. Cue the fandom going up in flames over either Hussie being "thin-skinned" or the complaining side of the fandom having annoyed Hussie to the point of submission, finally culminating with a response from Hussie's Tumblr explaining the situation. Cue the fandom going up in flames over the response, which prompted yet another post in which Hussie responded to some of the controversy regarding the previous post, calling out the people attacking other members of the fandom, picking ones ranging from "mild, but missing the point" to "unspeakably terrible" in that post before ending with a final jab at everyone involved for taking fandom arguments way too far.
Andrew Hussie: If you truly dislike censorship, and do not wish to see more self-censorship in the future, then you would be doing your part to behave in a way that doesn’t make creators feel embarrassed to be defended by you.
The author of the Yaoi Webcomic House of Dyer apparently received hate mail that was so vile that she not only cancelled the comic but closed the website and removed all artwork related to the comic from her DeviantArt page and Tumblr.
A webcomic titled Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club was cancelled when, despite the creators trying to reassure that they weren't trying to invoke stereotypes with the story and were using their studies and time in Japan to help with creation of the comic, Tumblr writers accused them of doing just that, claiming that they were doing it because "it was trendy".
Michelle Czajkowski, creator of Ava's Demon, was driven off of Tumblr by the abuse they received after stating that there were no asexual characters in the comic and refusing aggressive demands to include some.
An in-universe example from El Goonish Shive: Susan opted to disable comments on the video review show that she makes with Elliot after repeated comments mocking her for being "lanky", to the point where some people even told her to eat a sandwich.
The comic Boy's Club is most well-known for Pepe the Frog (also known as the "Feels Good" and "Sad" Frog), which has been frequently used as reaction images. However, as time went on, Pepe has been used in increasingly unsavory ways. It got so bad that the Anti-Defamation League now has it listed as a hate symbol. Matt Furie, the creator of Boy's Club, has also spoken out against such use. After his reaction failed to save the character, Pepe was finally killed off in 2017. A little over a year later, Furie learned that by not enforcing his copyright, Pepe would be in the public domain, which in turn led to someone publishing an ultra-conservative children's book about Pepe trying to stop a character who is a very thinly veiled stand-in for Islam. This pushed Furie to take steps to reclaim Pepe, sending a cease-and-desist to the book's author.
Rich Burlew, the artist and writer of The Order of the Stick, frequently has to contend with the fact that he doesn't perfectly follow the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, since the comic is supposed to have an RPG Mechanics 'Verse based on D&D's 3.5 Edition. Eventually, Burlew got sick of all of the comments on the subject, leading to a forum post where Burlew chastised the Vocal Minority of people who just wouldn't shut up about it, with Burlew saying he cares more about making a visually interesting and entertaining fight scene than properly following each and every rule.invoked
Rich Burlew: The characters fight the way they fight to make an interesting page. They may make subpar decisions, I don't care. I don't spend enough time with the D&D rules anymore to eke out all of these Ultimate Killer Strategies anyway, so we're really running up against the limits of my knowledge and ability. The characters can't be better strategists than I am, and I care more about other aspects. Such strategies are usually boring to read and visually bland to look at anyway. [...] My job is to entertain, not to showcase perfect D&D tactics. If you can't be entertained by anything BUT perfect D&D tactics, that's on you.
Gigi D.G., author of Hiimdaisy and Cucumber Quest, was formerly very interactive on social media but began lessening their online presence around 2015. While part of the reason was due to dealing with personal issues at the time, it also stemmed from their artwork and Tumblr posts being subjected to a lot of pushback and nitpicking from disgruntled followers.
Springtrap and Deliah: One of the biggest factors in Quinn's Creator Breakdown and eventual deletion of her account was some fans continually pestering and rushing her to complete the comic's endings, even after saying multiple times that she wanted nothing to do with the comic anymore (admittedly in comment sections entirely unrelated to the comic which could be easily missed and not in an official post).

Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things

Examples

Alternative Title(s): Why The Fandom Cant Have Nice Things

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