Never Live It Down / Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • While it's not exactly the worst example (heck, in-game it's pretty awesome), Phoenix Wright will forever be known as the lawyer that proved one of his clients was not guilty by cross-examining a parrot (in context, he was trying to use phrases the parrot was trained to say to make a reasonable case that her owner knew something and thus should be called back for more questioning). This isn't helped by the fact that, years later, he would one-up himself by representing an orca in court. Which only happened because the orca's trainer heard about the parrot and thought that if any lawyer would be crazy enough to defend an animal, it'd be him.
  • The 2nd game, Justice For All, will never, ever live down its third case, "Turnabout Big Top", widely considered by fans to be one of the worst cases ever in the series. This is due to it being full of cross-examinations that arbitrarily dole out hefty punishments, and the case itself having little connection to the overarching plot. Many consider Moe's cross-examination in 2-3 to be a major part of this reputation, since one wrong press among his many statements will get you penalized, and culminates with his last testimony, in which pressing any of his statements other than the correct one will cause you to instantly lose the case no matter how much health you have remaining. While the game at least has the Judge try to warn you, he does so in such a vague manner that you might not even notice it at all, or think he's just talking a standard 20% penalty (which you could get for needlessly pressing back in 1-4) instead of a 100% penalty. Granted, this is somewhat mitigated by the game's fourth case, "Farewell, My Turnabout", being considered one of the best in the series, but at best fans consider Justice for All to be a mixed bag.
  • Relatedly, Apollo Justice will not be able to live down his entire game which was largely disliked for him replacing Phoenix Wright as a protagonist, and the story having Phoenix also have a fall from grace as one of its major premises (all this said, the game is not terrible on its own merits). He might be starting to live it down, however, as the 6th game did a lot for both his backstory and characterization.
  • Miles Edgeworth is known for two things - smugly presenting an updated autopsy report that disproves Phoenix's argument exactly one time in the entire series, and for mentioning his "unnecessary feelings" in conversation with Phoenix. The number of memes made about the former make one wonder if he does it as frequently as Franziska whips people or Godot drinks coffee (perhaps it's because it's one of the very first things he does in the entire series (and the first time a prosecutor uses underhanded tactics), leaving a memorable first impression on players that refuses to go away). The latter is so frequently taken out of context for jokes about homoerotic subtext between the two that its actual meaning (Edgeworth's first-ever losses in court causing him to deeply question the principles he has spent his entire career following) can be easily forgotten or missed entirely.
  • In the same vein as the "unnecessary feelings", there's Klavier Gavin's "I've never felt this way with a man before" line. With how the fandom presents this line, it's easy to forget that he isn't flirting with Apollo, but teasing him because he was staring- and Apollo wasn't staring because he found Klavier attractive, but because he mistook Klavier for his older brother Kristoph, who Apollo had helped imprison for Shadi Smith's murder a few months ago.
• Air has Misuzu's death at the very end.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
    • Poor Sayaka Maizono. All her appearances in later media confirm that she's a Nice Girl who cares for her friends and genuinely likes Naegi, but thanks to being the first to snap and try to commit murder, plus trying to frame Naegi for it, she's pretty much doomed to be remembered as a Cute and Psycho Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, even though TTH makes it fairly clear that Sayaka really didn't want to kill anyone, her murder attempt was half-hearted, and she only did it in the first place because Monokuma played on her emotional dependence on her idol friends and deep-seated fear of abandonment. People also tend to forget that she's one of the morally cleanest murderers, as she's the only student in to never learn about class trials and thus never know that graduating meant that everyone, not just her target, would die.
    • Chapter 2 seems to doom Byakuya Togami to have a fetish for desecrating corpses and regularly tampering with crime scenes. This is despite that he eventually tones down his prickliness although he's still a huge Jerkass even as he survived the whole game.
    • Kiyotaka Ishimaru crying only happens once. But his crying sprite and the accompanying text is so over-the-top that 'crying Take' fanarts are very abundant on the net.
    • Chihiro Fujisaki is a timid, sweet kid who only wants to aid others (namely by means of computer programs), and also has a weakness complex. But if you see some fandom like Tumblr, the most you would see is arguments over whether he is a Wholesome Crossdresser or a trans girl, despite the latter theory having been explicitly Jossed.
    • This seems to apply to Makoto Naegi as well, who isn't as skilled as his main teammates. Because of this, he is often stereotyped as slow in the brain or being the 'heroine' instead of the 'hero'. This persists even though Makoto actually proved superior to Byakuya in the fourth trial, since the latter was too caught up in his assumptions to realize the truth.
    • Due to the fan reception of Hifumi, it's incredibly common to see his motive for killing Take boil down to having Alter Ego all to himself. However, this was not the only motive Hifumi had been given to drive him to murder; in fact, Celestia gave him very serious motives on top of Alter Ego's abduction that make his reasons for murder far less ridiculous than just for the love of an AI program. Though to be fair, even if he believed her (rather obvious) lie to be true, Hifumi still had no qualms about letting everyone besides her and himself die. Noble intention or not, there really isn't any way to justify his actions.
    • Within that same case, Celestia Ludenberg's stated motivation for plotting the murder of two people being to obtain ten-million dollars and buy an European castle where she is indulged by handsome male servants dressed up as vampires is so outrageous that a good many fans swallowed it at face value, forgetting that Celeste is a Consummate Liar and that everything about the persona she puts on even down to the name is dishonest. Even disregarding supplementary material such as the manga, the game itself drops several hints that her real motive for the killings was based around self-esteem issues as Taeko Yasuhiro and the fact that she fell into despair of ever getting out of Hope's Peak Academy through any other method.
    • Kyoko Kirigiri performing certain investigations for two of the victims of the killing game (for context, it's implied she found out that Chihiro was male by touching his crotch, and she then finds a note Hifumi was trying to hide by looking inside his underpants) has convinced some people that she has a fetish for dead bodies. Not helping matters is that in Danganronpa 3 she uncovers a vital clue to a murder by tasting a corpse's saliva.
    • There is a lot of fanart of Kyoko having a ramen cup on her head. This is even though she only had a ramen cup appear on her head once, and it only happened for a very brief moment in the game.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair:
    • A chapter 1 CG shows Hajime Hinata, the protagonist, holding a glass of orange juice. The fandom ran with it and made Hajime's favourite drink be orange juice despite the fact that he is not shown talking about it, let alone drinking it, anywhere else throughout the game.
    • While Mahiru Koizumi is shown to be a much more complex character than she initially seems, her hatedom sees her as a misandrist, due to her labeling Hajime as "unreliable," and scheduling a girls-only get together in chapter 2. In truth, Mahiru doesn't hate men, she is harsh towards them as a result of her issues with her father, whom she still loves regardless, while she was younger. Her Free Time Events also show that she develops a crush on Hajime and is more of a Tsundere than anything.
    • Kazuichi Soda, who despite having an interesting backstory, is not given much more credit than being a Stalker with a Crush and a pervert desperately going after Sonia. Justified in this case as he does gets his own share of Flanderization as the story progresses, and you wouldn't know much else about him unless you do his Free Time Events.
    • While she's by no means a saint, many fans tend to blow Hiyoko Saionji's bullying of Mikan Tsumiki out of proportion (they are no more than a bunch of childish insults, but Mikan reacts to them the way she does because of her previous experiences with bullying), or say that she only targets Mikan, when in reality she insults everyone except Mahiru, and Mikan (and Kazuichi to a lesser extent) is the only one who really reacts to her insults, as everyone else tends to either ignore Hiyoko or laugh at her antics.
    • The worst seems to happen to Nagito Komaeda, who is arguably the most important character in the story and has an interesting backstory in which all the bad luck he has suffered has led him to have blind faith in the arbitrary concept of "hope", do a lot of morally questionable things, and even calls himself a mere stepping-stone for hope and doesn't mind being killed by the protagonist, Hajime Hinata, if it "makes Hinata-kun reach an even greater hope". However, his obsessive nature has had the student to become a particularly Memetic character in the fanbase, which (mostly jokingly) characterize said student as a crazy Laughing Mad Yandere hope fetishist who wants Hajime's dick for the sake of HOPE.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
    • Korekiyo Shinguji will always be known for his incestuous relationship with his sister and the method he used to murder Tenko: the seesaw effect. Not helped by the fact that he had already killed Angie when she stumbled upon him setting up his seesaw trap and therefore had no reason to use the trap to kill someone else, but went ahead and used it anyway simply because he was so proud of his trap he couldn't help himself. Even worse, if he had never used the trap, he would have gotten away with Angie's murder for a number of reasons detailed here. So yeah, maybe that one's a bit justified.
    • Kokichi Oma had one official artwork of holding a bottle of Panta. The fandom decided to roll with that and fan works often depicted him as a huge Panta lover despite the fact he never talks about Panta in the actual game and is in fact shown to drink tea.
• Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind: Ayumi Tachibana seems to be renowned in the Japanese fandom for her reckless action of drugging the protagonist with a sleeping pill in his coffee. Even the Japanese description of her trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee lampshaded this.
• Fate Series:
  • Shirou Emiya from Fate/stay night has received this several times over:
    • One of Shirou's ideals as an All-Loving Hero is that he doesn't want to see Saber (and, for the most part, Saber specifically) injured because of his own weakness. Unfortunately, the way he expresses this is by insisting that Saber stay back and let him do the fighting, which makes Shirou look unbelievably stupid as Saber is a superpowered warrior woman and Shirou is among the least competent fighters in the series (not for lack of trying on his part, to be fair), and many fans interpreted this as Shirou believing that Saber should Stay in the Kitchen. It doesn't help that this part of Shirou's characterization only really comes out in the "Fate" storyline, which for a long time was the only route that had an anime adaptation, so anyone who didn't play the Visual Novel never saw his inner monologues and Character Development that make his real feelings and intentions clear.
    • He is often branded Captain Obvious based on one moment that didn't really even happen: the infamous "People die when they are killed." line isn't even an accurate translation; what he said was more along the lines of, "Normal people are supposed to die from (these kinds of injuries)". He may be stupid in other ways, but pointing out the obvious isn't really one of them.
  • It doesn’t matter what insane demonstrations of power Merlin saves the day with, he will always be known for the time he temporarily gave Saber a penis.
• Yes. School Days is a Deconstruction of the harem genre. Yes, things do have the potential to go horribly wrong. Yes, Makoto is a bit of a horny bastard. But what people tend to forget is that the game does have several normal, good endings- if you're at least halfway decent to the girls, you can end up in a stable relationship with nary a hint of Yandere (And if you make the right choices, you can Marry Them All). The overly gory bad ends that the anime was based on only happen if you make the choice to be a two-timing jerk.
• If someone is making fun of Battler Ushiromiya from Umineko: When They Cry, then you can be sure they'll bring up the time he tried to explain away a locked room murder by suggesting that the killer could have planted tiny bombs in the victims' food, then detonated them remotely when they had finished eating. It doesn't matter that he said this while being encouraged to blurt out any theory he could come up with, no matter how outlandish. For many people, this theory was just too outlandish and neither the fans nor the other characters have let him hear the end of it.

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