The Scrappy Cleanup

They are mutually exclusive and BBC is probably the safer one to keep.

Permission to readd the entry about Tobias to the list of Pokemon scrappies. He's universally hated by the entire community, and he's not on the "Do Not Add" list for that exact reason. The person who deleted it in the first place was spouting some nonsense about one episode not being enough to add a character (despite TV Tokyo having to disable You Tube ratings due to the backlash and it being a multi-episode thing), but the Western Animation section gets to keep Bendy?

Edit: Apologies if the "spouting nonsense" part seemed rude, that's just how I talk. And Bendy was a character from the show Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends who was so reviled by the fans of the show that the creator apologized for writing the one episode he appeared in.

Edited by Onlythrice on Oct 23rd 2018 at 2:54:50 PM

One, I'm incredibly skeptical of any claims that a character is reviled by the whole community, especially considering how big the Pokemon fandom is. Please first give proof that the vast majority of the Japanese fanbase hates him before we can even think about qualifying him. Preferably something more concrete than "I've been on a bunch of forums, trust me!"

Second, going on about people "spouting nonsense" makes you look kind of rude and needlessly aggressive. Please cut it out.

Third, I have no idea who "Bendy" is, so I can't really comment on why they're listed as the Scrappy. But if you think they don't count, bring them up in the thread.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Oct 22nd 2018 at 5:12:56 AM

But they did post proof (TV Tokyo having to disable You Tube ratings due to the backlash). You can't get much more definitive than creator acknowledgement.

I don't watch the anime, but I say Tobias is okay only if people's dislike of him is still a thing that pops up regularly in discussion, and not just some "drama of the week" that the fanbase has largely moved on from.

Edited by mrbits on Oct 22nd 2018 at 8:54:35 AM

TV Tokyo having to disable comments really doesn't say much. For all we know, they could've disabled comments because of really hateful comments from a vocal minority, and you need a lot more haters than a local minority to be The Scrappy.

I am somewhat familiar with the character and am guessing that most of the hate comes from him defeating the protagonist in a tournament. What I want to know is whether any hate he got has blown over or if the hatred still persists. If the hatred isn't there anymore, all you have is some kneejerk reactions.

I was on r/smashbros a while ago, and a topic regarding Greninja ended up getting derailed because a guy brought up how much of a piss off the Kalos League was, followed by people admitting how sour they were that Ash had to lose because Tobias had Plot Armor. I haven't actually watched the show; this is what I was reading in the comments.

Obviously not the largest sample size, and the cesspit known as Reddit is probably a bad place to look, but it's a start for what we're looking for here.

Edited by DocSharp on Oct 22nd 2018 at 11:16:21 AM

I'd still be wary of using Internet communities as references, especially since most of them don't even make up a majority of the fanbase, meaning you're getting a very small sample size.

In the case of Tobias, you still also need to figure out what the vast majority of the Japanese fanbase thinks of him, especially since Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy are mutually exclusive from each other. Again, I'd like to know if any hatred shown towards him was more of a kneejerk reaction or not to the episode where he defeats Ash.

From YMMV.The Haunting Of Hill House:

• The Scrappy: While most, if not all the characters are likable people, Joey is not one of them since she refuses to stay clean due to becoming the Straw Nihilist and later on backstabs Luke after he went looking for her. Considering she's not seen again after the episode ends, it's pretty clear she ruined her chances once again and probably doesn't care.

Joey only appears in Luke's backstory where she takes advantage of his feelings for her to steal his money for drugs. She is never seen again, including in the Esoteric Happy Ending, except for one scene where the haunted house takes her form to torture Luke. I think it's pretty obvious she was never supposed to be liked.

Sounds like a Hate Sink. Go ahead and cut.

Should Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy really be mutually exclusive though? Let's think about the trope namer, Tingle, for a bit.

Tingle is a character from The Legend of Zelda series who is mostly liked in Japan, but mostly hated in other parts of the world, particularly North America. But the Zelda series is also an example of Germans Love David Hasselhoff, and the North American fanbase is much larger than the Japanese fanbase. Excluding Tingle from The Scrappy just because a minority section of the fanbase likes him, is just silly.

Which brings me back to Tobias. Pokemon is a massively international franchise with huge fanbases around the world. Even if the Anime is comparatively more Japan focused, I find it very hard to believe that Japan makes up 50% of the community.

Yes, Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy should be mutually exclusive. One is about a character disliked liked by their home country and disliked outside of it, while the other is about a character hated by the vast majority of the entire fanbase. If Tingle is well-liked enough in the country where his game originates from, he doesn't belong in The Scrappy period, no matter how much his hatedom tries to shoehorn him into it.

Heck, we had some people try to shoehorn in a character who was very popular in Japan (Severa from Fire Emblem: Awakening) by saying she was a "Scrappy in the West." As you could expect, the entry read like a personal gripe and was rightfully torched.

But tingle ‘’Is’’ disliked by a most of the fan base. Japan may have been the origin of Zelda, but in terms of the global fanbase they are the minority since it’s a series that’s much more popular overseas, particularly in the west.

Fire Emblem is a different case since that series is actually more popular back in Japan (though I’m not sure about Awakening specifically) The two situations are not comparable.

But see, Fire Emblem (especially the newer games) are actually more popular in the west. Compare Awakening and Fates' sales to the Japanese and you'll see they sold better in America, thus the west has more fans. Fire Emblem is a niche Nintendo series outside of Marth's games at best in Japan. I looked it up.

Severa was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in Fates too when she was Selena so there's that too.

The reason Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy are mutually exclusive is to ensure that anyone under The Scrappy has failed to appeal to their core audience in their home country.

Characters like Severa and Tingle were primarily made with Japanese audiences in mind, and both of them proved popular with said audience. That's why they don't count as The Scrappy; they were well-received by the core audience they were meant to appeal to. Severa wasn't Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, because she was never a Scrappy to begin with.

That's why Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy are mutually exclusive; it makes people go and verify that the character not only failed to appeal to the core audience they were meant to appeal to, but also earned said audience's hatred.

But Japan is not Zelda’s core audience. It is a series designed with international appeal. Just because something came from Japan, that doesn’t automatically make it the be-all-end-all Judge of whether or not a character can be a scrappy.

While the Zelda games were meant to appeal to international audiences, I would say that Japanese players are still the primary audience they have in mind when crafting characters since Nintendo is, well, a Japanese company.

We've been over Tingle a couple times before, and we've concluded he doesn't count. Popular in his own home country of Japan, popular enough to pop up several more times in other games, and no concrete evidence that the vast majority of the fanbase, including the Japanese fanbase, hates him.

Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy should be mutually exclusive. The former is about two cultures having different opinions, and the latter is about everyone having the same opinion. Those do not mix by definition.

Again, apologies if I seemed rude earlier, wasn't trying to give off that impression. And to elaborate, the hatred towards Tobias isn't solely because he defeated Ash in a League; Ritchie still has plenty of fans and you rarely see strong opinions towards Harrison or Tyson these days. A large part of it stems from the fact that he doubled as both a Diabolus ex Machina and a Mary Sue. He showed up virtually out of nowhere with very little buildup, swept Ash 6-2 with two Olympus Mons with no exposition as to how he obtained these incredibly rare monsters that only Elite Four-caliber Frontier Brains had been shown using, and then vanished forever. He was created for the sole purpose of making Ash lose, which the fans (both Eastern and Western) responded to with 60,000 dislikes on the TV Tokyo clip. And it was far from a knee-jerk reaction, it's been nearly a decade since then and as someone earlier in the thread mentioned, you can't have a discussion about the League in the anime without someone angrily mentioning Tobias. Alain's win was arguably about as frustrating as Tobias', but the sole fact that he wasn't just thrown in to make Ash lose and actually had buildup and a role in the story won him enough fans to be considered a Base Breaker.

What are those 60k dislikes comparable to? How many likes? How many views? How many do they usually get?

And I also agree that Americans Hate Tingle and The Scrappy should be kept separate. But if Tobias had any significant amount of affection in Japan, wouldn't he have been listed under Americans Hate Tingle by now? It's been eight years and it's not as if people don't know he exists.

Apologies again, I misremembered. It was Alain that made them disable ratings, not Tobias. Not sure if something similar happened with him. But to answer your question, shortly after the initial upload it was 68,000 views, 21,000 dislikes, and less than 500 likes.

Edited by Onlythrice on Oct 23rd 2018 at 4:00:04 AM

So is there anything then that points towards Tobias being hated in Japan? He fits under one of the tropes; I'm just not sure which.

I'm sure there is, but Americans Hate Tingle is used to describe characters who are well-liked in their home countries and I haven't seen any evidence of Tobias being liked by a significant amount of people in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter. I know for a fact the Japanese were mad as hell about the Alain loss, and this one was arguably worse.

Edited by Onlythrice on Oct 23rd 2018 at 11:43:17 AM

Dogasu's Backpack is a good resource for figuring out how the Japanese side of the Pokemon fandom reacts. The main focus of the site is comparing the English and Japanese versions of the anime.

In his coverage of the episode Tobias appeared in, he claimed that "people were pissed when this episode came out" and that the episode had a lot working against it when it first aired. So, that indicates the fanbase on both sides of the globe were not happy with how the fight with Tobias turned out.

With that, I'd say stick him under The Scrappy. There's no evidence to the contrary.

Thanks guys, glad we could resolve this.

Should this example from High School Of The Dead go or stay?: The Straw Nihilist mall survivor who meets a hilariously pathetic end after suicidally charging into a group of zombies, armed with only a knife, and failing to even knick one of them.