Write Who You Hate

"If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

The Real Life counterpart to Revenge via Storytelling, and a specific form of Take That!. Similar to No Celebrities Were Harmed, this is when a writer creates a character based on someone they have a grudge against in real life in order to vent their frustrations on that person, and, in some cases influence the public's opinions on them. These characters will typically be highly obnoxious or unlikable, if not outright villainous. They will almost always receive a humiliating comeuppance at the end of the story.

Depending on how the character is written, and the nature of the real-life conflict, this can either be done well or come off as petty and juvenile. Often, if there's someone who likes the character in question, other characters will lampshade how said character is that character's Only Friend. More often than not, however, there will be occasions where the author adds several bits of hatefulness into the character that may not really be related to the targeted person.

Note that authors must have the required skill to pull this over without attracting legal teams, as otherwise they'll be Screwed by the Network or The Laywers.

Subtrope to Write Who You Know and Creator Breakdown. Supertrope to Take That, Critics!, Take That, Audience!, Straw Critic, and Straw Fan. Compare Muse Abuse, where the creator doesn't hate the people he takes inspiration from for their history but still chooses to portray them in a negative light. Compare Unperson, where instead of a Take That! the character/person is excised from the world's history. Tends to overlap with Tuckerization, though some authors are known to defy it in order to not raise suspicions (and avoid possible lawsuits), in whose case they indulge in Roman à Clef. If the targeted person actually likes the character, it's Actually Pretty Funny. When the whole work is done as a single piece of Take That!, it's either a Revenge Fic, an Allegory or an Author Tract. Contrast Friendly Enemy: there, both the creator and its target remain on friendly terms while exchanging potshots with each other, while here they hate each other.

Note that, due to the controversial nature of the trope, there should be a Word of God (not Word of Saint Paul and much less fan speculation) statement attached to any example in the form of a link or the name of a documentary/biography or even an interview. And the examples should also describe the feud while still remembering that Weblinks Are Not Examples.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: According to the Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, Moe is based on Bill Watterson's childhood bullies.
  "Moe is every jerk I've ever known.… I remember school being full of idiots like Moe."

Films — Animated

• Hercules: While the inspiration for the design of Hades was never made clear an interview with co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements and character animator Eric Goldberg do mention that his chant "Guys, guys, listen to me" is inspired by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left the company following a tenuous stay under Michael Eisner.^note Amongst Katzenberg's acts, he had nearly cut "Part of Your World" out of The Little Mermaid, forced everyone to work overtime on Beauty and the Beast (though in his defense, he forced it due to the news that Howard Ashman, the film's composer, was on his deathbed and wanted it done before he passed), disregarded Robin Williams wishes on Aladdin regarding him voicing the Genie, put greater faith in Pocahontas while dismissing The Lion King (1994) as a one-off, and, most infamously, ordered Toy Story be "edgy and cynical" to the point that PIXAR followed their directions to a tee and brought a disastrous test screening that nearly destroyed the film. The final straw, however, was Katzenberg demanding the position of the late VP Frank Wells, who died in a helicopter crash in 1994, when Wells was a close friend of Eisner and often had to mediate the spats between the two men.
• The Rescuers: As revealed on Walt Disney's Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation, Madame Medusa was based on Milt Kahl's ex-wife Phyllis Bounds Detiege (who was related to Walt Disney as the niece of his wife Lillian) Milt was married 3 times and she was the only wife he divorced (the other two died from illness). He made sure to include traits of hers such as her flamboyance, fake eyelashes, and what he called the "aging sexpot attitude", as well as her favorite style of boots. Another animator, Jane Baer (who knew both) later told historian John Canemaker, "Phyllis wore boots. Medusa wore the same boots."

Films — Live-Action

• Back to the Future: As revealed in a Q&A with director Robert Zemeckis & producer Bob Gale found in the "Back to the Future" DVD, Biff Tannen was named after Ned Tanen, a former executive at Paramount Pictures, whom Zemeckis and Gale had a bad experience with while making I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
• Trey Parker confessed in the DVD commentary for Cannibal! The Musical that he wrote the film as a diss against his high-school sweetheart Liane, whom he was engaged with until he discovered her sleeping with an a capella singer.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: According to the film's DVD audio commentary, one of Wes Craven's inspirations for Freddy Krueger was a school bully.

Literature

• David Drake sometimes included various detestable characters named Platt in his novels. (There are two in the RCN series alone, a Spoiled Brat and a child molester.) These are named after a critic named Charles Platt who unfavorably reviewed Hammer's Slammers with a line that if Drake had ever served in the military, he wouldn't write "such queasy voyeurism". Drake, who served in Vietnam as a US Army interrogator attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry and started writing Military Science Fiction as self-therapy, took this remark rather personally; the best any character named Platt can hope for in his works is to be merely stupid.
• As described in CGP Grey's video "Someone Dead Ruined My Life Again", Alexander Pope criticized Thomas Hearne's writings as pointless. When Hearne complained, Pope wrote a caricature of Hearne in one of his plays.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Infamous Room 101 in the Ministry of Love is named for Room 101 in BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, where George Orwell had to sit through several tedious meetings.
• Captain Underpants: According to Dav Pilkey himself, Melvin Sneedly, the stuck-up nerd, is based on an arrogant tattletale child that Pilkey Dav knew in sixth grade, who has been given the alias "Michael Sneedman" to conceal his identity.
• Decline And Fall: Burglar Toby Cruttwell is based on C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, a famed British historian who was Waugh's tutor when he was at Hertford, and who had told Waugh that he would never amount to anything. In his autobiography A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh had a lifelong beef with him, and named a number of disreputable characters in his books after Cruttwell.
• Goldfinger: Ian Fleming named the titular villain after architect Erno Goldfinger, whose work Fleming despised. When Erno threatened to sue, Fleming suggested changing the name of the villain to Goldprick, instead.
• Harry Potter:
  • According to an interview with PotterCast, JK Rowling based Pansy Parkinson on the girls who bullied her in school. She considers her the "anti-Hermione", who is her self-insert.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: JK Rowling once mentioned at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2004 that Professor Gilderoy Lockhart is the only character in the work based on a real person^note she insists it's not her ex-husband who she claims is an enormous blowhard just like him, and that she barely exaggerated his real personality; even if she dropped hints, she refused to comment on who, because she didn't want to give him the satisfaction.
    J.K. Rowling: The only character who is deliberately based on a real person is Gilderoy Lockhart. Maybe he is not the one that you would think of, but I have to say that the living model was worse. He was a shocker! The lies that he told about adventures that he'd had, things he'd done and impressive acts that he had committed... He was a shocking man. I can say this quite freely because he will never in a million years dream that he is Gilderoy Lockhart. I am always frightened that he is going to turn up one day. He is just one of those people from your past whom you feel you have never quite shaken off. I will look up one day at a signing and he will say, "Hello, Jo". Other people have contributed the odd characteristic, such as a nose, to a character, but the only character who I sat down and thought that I would base on someone is Gilderoy Lockhart. It made up for having to endure him for two solid years.
• Riverworld: The Author Avatar Peter Jairus Frigate meets and takes vengeance on a cheating publisher called "Sharko" who's resurrected from the dead and immediately joins a gang seeking to exploit other resurrectées. Philip José Farmer noted in the work's end-note that he based him on a real-life publisher called Melvin Korshak who cheated him over a contract while Farmer was signed to Shasta Publishing.

Live-Action TV

• In audio commentaries on the DVD release of Press Gang, Steven Moffat explains that the breakdown of his first marriage affected his writing, including an episode featuring an Expy of his wife's new lover who had various unfortunate events happen to him, such as a typewriter being dropped on his foot. This also formed the basis of his semi-autobiographical sitcom Joking Apart.
• The Wire:
  • Writer and former newspaper reporter David Simon based two different characters on Bill Marrimow, his former editor with whom he had a bitter feud while working for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. The first, Lt. Charles Marrimow, is an utterly incompetent and hardass police lieutenant whose true purpose in being appointed the new commander of a special police unit is to disrupt the unit and make it so impossible for the unit to function that it disintegrates, thus quietly halting their investigations into various corrupt politicians and shady businessmen who are power players in the city. The second character, an editor at the fictional version of the Baltimore Sun within the show, is a stuck-up prig who protects a journalist who is fabricating stories and is noted to be engaging in hiring attractive young women for their looks.
  • The executive editor in charge of the fictional version of the Sun, James Whiting, is based on an executive editor from Simon's time at the real Sun, John Carroll. Whiting is a Pointy-Haired Boss and Upper-Class Twit who also goes out of his way to protect the reporter fabricating stories. Another character speculates that he does it purely in hopes that the sensationalist fabricated stories can win a Pulitzer Prize and raise Whiting's profile within the newspaper industry, so even if the Sun goes under, as many fear will happen, Whiting and company can easily secure their next job.

Music

• Dream Theater: As drummer Mike Portnoy told on an IRC conversation, he wrote the lyrics of "Honor Thy Father" (from 2003's Train of Thought) as a potshot towards his step-father. He outright claimed in an interview that he couldn't write a love song, so instead he decided to pen a hate song.
  "It is aimed directly at somebody else in my immediate family. If you take the keyword from the title as well as the keyword from the bridge (Crooked _____), you can figure out who it was written for. [Stepfather] I've never been good at writing love songs, so I decided to write a HATE song!"
• Eminem:
  • As he confessed to the Rolling Stone Magazine in an interview, "Brain Damage" is about his grade-school nemesis, D'Angelo Bailey, who once battered him so severely he ended up comatose from a cerebral hemorrhage.
  • He also acknowledges, in an interview with Hot 97, the beef with Ray Benzino, editor of the magazine The Source and the inspiration of many of Em's songs such as "Say What You Say", "The Invasion (The Realest)", "The Sauce", "Nail In The Coffin", "Welcome to Detroit City", "Go To Sleep", "We All Die One Day", "The Invasion (The Conspiracy)", "The Invasion (Armageddon)", "Doe Rae Me (Hailie's Revenge)", "Keep Talkin'", "Wrong", "Bully", "Fubba U Cubba Cubba", "Like Toy Soldiers", "My 1st Single", "Bump Heads", "Hail Mary", "I'm Gone", "Never Enough", "Big Weenie", "Gatman and Robbin" and "Killshot".
• According to an interview released in the New Musical Express magazine in March 2005, Gwen Stefani wrote "Hollaback Girl" as a diss track towards Courtney Love, who thought that Stefani's past as a cheerleader was worthy of derision.
• P!nk's "So What" was written about her ex-husband Carey Hart, with the music video even showing Pink taking a chainsaw to a tree with her and Hart's names carved in it. The line where Pink seemingly disses Jessica Simpson is actually an odd way of saying that Simpson is cooler than her since the waiter keeps giving Pink's table to the latter. Hart and Pink would end up getting back together about a year after the song was released, with Pink herself saying that she found it funny to perform the song in front of him.

Tabletop Games

• The developers confirmed that the Lady of Pain from Planescape was based on then TRS CEO Lorraine Williams, and her My Way or the Highway managerial style.

Webcomics

• One of the villains in Goblins is Dellyn Goblinslayer, a Fantastic Racist, Sadistic Torture Technician, Rapist and general Hate Sink. The author, Ellipsis, has stated that Dellyn is based on a group of four men who kidnapped and gang-raped her mother.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: The author of SCP-4493 was harassed by a pair of users from a rival website for another work they wrote, and incorporated their usernames into the article as the names of police officers that were killed by the anomaly.

Western Animation

• South Park: As revealed in interviews, Trey Parker's real-life sister provided the basis for Stan's bully sister Shelly, who was abusive to him when they were kids (while the violence was nowhere near as bad as it was on the show, the real-life Shelly did punch Trey, push him down the stairs and lock him out of the house on occasion)..

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