The Scrappy Cleanup

So the villain is disliked because they get an implausible level of benefit of the doubt from the story? I wonder if that could be a distinct trope...

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 13th 2018 at 8:41:05 AM

Villain Sue may be that trope.

Or if a villain's Freudian Excuse is meant to make them sympathetic but fails to engender any sympathy.

Or if a villain is supposed to be scary, but is hated because they fail at providing a credible threat, rendering their appearances tedious instead of tense.

Lots of ways it could happen. the common thread is that they are hated for reasons other than intended.

A villain can be hated for reasons that weren't intended, but I don't think "her selfish, shallow personality" was meant to be an endearing trait, so that part might need to be removed. Having an annoying gimmick and feeling like a rehash of previous villains do sound like valid arguments for disliking a character.

Isn't that Unintentionally Unsympathetic?

There are villains that are just terrible and do not resonate with the viewers. They can get built up as awesome threats but actually end up being complete pieces of crap and nonthreatening or just annoying whenever they are on screen.

For an example. Yuna in Gundam Seed Destiny, completely built up as a legitimate villain for 40ish episode of the 50 episode series. He was so hated by the fanbase that they just gave up on trying to actually make him the villain and unceremoniously dropped a mobile suit on him to cheers.

Edited by Memers on Jul 13th 2018 at 7:43:26 AM

Villains are typically Hate Sinks, so it's the same distinction we make with those. Which is that while they technically are the same trope, they require more context because we need to know why they're The Scrappy that isn't covered by Hate Sink.

Did they give up or was he intended to subvert expectations of relevance and fail like he did?

Deleted Vignette Valencia since most of the reasons she's listed are intentional.

Thoughts on giving this trope a waiting period like Base-Breaking Character?

Another villain I can think of who was hated for the wrong reasons was Valtor from the Winx Club. Mostly because he was supposed to be a huge hyped up threat, yet ends up doing very little, contributes to the Villain Decay of the popular Trix, and goes One-Winged Angel in the finale yet still manages to not do anything of importance and gets taken out in a few hits. When your fanbase of young girls-teenage girls realizes you have a terrible villain, you really messed up somewhere.

Edited by PhiSat on Jul 13th 2018 at 1:11:28 PM

Again, how can we tell the difference from a villain that was supposed to be a letdown or came of as such from bad writing?

From The Legend of Korra:

• Mako, while he's always had a sizable fanbase, was The Scrappy for many during Books 1 and 2, due almost entirely to the Love Dodecahedron running through those seasons, and his role in it. Thanks to a combination of an inability to commit, his lack of relationship experience and knowledge of how to deal with the feelings of others, and his tendency to swallow his own feelings, he constantly made boneheaded and/or insensitive relationship decisions that wound up repeatedly hurting Korra, Asami and Bolin, making him look like a major Jerkass, and dragging out the love triangle subplot long past the point where it'd outstayed its welcome. He proceeded to win back a lot of points after the love triangle was finally resolved, but his Hatedom in the first half of the show was massive.
• Book 3's Tagalong Kid, Kai, immediately started off as one. He is a Street Urchin who happens to be an Airbender, so the writers could get away with a Toy Ship between him and Jinora. However, he's also an unrepentant thief who stole the life savings from a family who took him in, stringing Bolin along when Bolin wants to be his big brother, and finally stealing from both Bolin and Mako and leaving them stranded in the Outer Ring of Ba Sing Se without any remorse while stealing from people all around the city. You really have to be hated when people start cheering for the Dai Li to catch him and take him away. In fact, some people were actually disappointed when he survived being blasted off the cliff by P'Li. He did get better later on.

Mako it admits had fans. Kai was supposed to be unlikable for it a first, Base-Breaking Character on if their later actions redeemed them. Any objections to cutting?

In that specific instance I'd say the text wanted him to appear as a significant threat due to the constant Character Shilling he was being given by other characters, but fell short of that mark because he rarely got any screentime and mostly just engaged in Offscreen Villainy we hear about from, again, other people. When he was on-screen he didn't end up doing much. The audience reaction as a result was to see him as overhyped rather than a real threat.

I love entries that open by admitting they are misuse. Mako in the first two seasons is definitely a Base-Breaking Character. Not sure about Kai.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Jul 13th 2018 at 11:29:03 AM

Found these stragglers on Found these on Star Ocean: The Last Hope:

• You won't find many fans of Sarah and Lymle because some fans are turned away by their voice acting and Sarah's numerous What an Idiot! moments.
• You'd be hard pressed to find many fans of this games version of Welch, with many seeing her as incredibly obnoxious and annoying. This is backed by her bad voice acting and being generally useless to the plot.
• Edge also gets a lot of hate during his... tantrum.

They should be removed. The first two examples don't provide any real context and the third refers only to a single specific moment during which this character is hated (implying that he isn't a hated character in general).

This example from Live-Action TV really sounds like nothing more than personal complaining. I'm not familiar enough with iCarly or its fandom to say whether this character is actually a Scrappy, but the example is badly written either way.

• iCarly: There's Guppy, when he got added to the show along with his brother Gibby. That whole upgrade has been horribly done, with boring sub-plots, and a complete lack of funny. How is saying "Happy Birthday" at random events funny?

Lymle is solidly an Americans Hate Tingle, the way they wrote her, the flat monotone VA and translating her Verbal Tic 'Desu' to 'Kay' but actually using it far more than the Japanese version had westerners hating her guts.

Its a game that most fans rec that it be played in Japanese specifically cause of her.

Sarah however not really.

Yeah, I definitely agree that those should be cut. Reads like complaining and has little to no context, which makes it come across like someone had an axe to grind.

Found this on Heroes Of Might And Magic Ashan:

• * The Scrappy: The fact that Celestial Heavens has "The Queen Isabel Kicking Game" is proof that she's considered the Scrappy. She's the main character of the V's saga to boot.

That entry should at least be commented out since it doesn't explain why she's hated.

Axe it. All that example shows is that the creator of that "game" has an axe to grind against the character.

This was on Animal Crossing:

• Replacement Scrappy: Due to difficulties getting holidays from different countries to work in a game featuring online, Wild World replaced most of the real-world holidays with fake ones like "Yay Day". Most fans consider them boring and unappealing compared to the holidays in other games.

Does this thread cover Replacement Scrappies too?

This thread is fair for that trope.

Holidays are not characters, so no.

Replacement Scrappy is for characters. Cut.

Shall I cut this from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow?

"Chupacabras. If players weren't annoyed that they stole your items and then made you play Hide and Seek, they were even more annoyed with the fact that it's a completely different creature with the name of the South American myth slapped on it.

• Also, on a side note - Chupacabras had been in Castlevania since Symphony Of The Night, although they suffered from a Dub Name Change and are called Cave Trolls in the western versions. Now this game introduces another sort of Cave Troll: A sort of cute mixture of a gorilla and a tapir, whose first appearance doubles as a Funny Moment, as well as a Bait-and-Switch Boss.
• Even worse, you don't even get to kill the annoying thing when you do catch it. Gabriel simply grabs the Chupacabras and forces it to give back his gear, then it vanishes.
  • This is also an interesting case in that the Chupacabras gets a Take That, Scrappy! in the same game that it first appears in: at one point you find a scroll on one of the dead Brotherhood knights talking about how he's been setting up an extermination squad to drive the Chupacabras extinct. Clearly the developers knew just how much their players were going to hate those things."

What a pile of steaming natter. Is Chupacabras a single character or a group? Also, it seems like it's supposed to be annoying.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2018 at 6:44:29 AM

That sounds more like Demonic Spiders or Scrappy Mechanic.

Edited by PhiSat on Jul 23rd 2018 at 9:23:56 AM