http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheScrappy

Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.

The original Scrappy in his native environment. We would say "Accept no substitutes", but asking you to accept him is perhaps asking too much.

Andy Zero dicussing the basic idea for a new trope idea they have "The key element is how this character drives some formerly rational fans to the lowest levels of foaming loonydom in their hatred."

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There are popular characters that have fandoms . But sometimes, there is a character who instead has a hatedom . We call this guy The Scrappy : a character that the audience hates to see.

It's not enough that the character be hated, however. For any character to truly solidify themselves as a Scrappy in the eyes of the audience, all of the following criteria have to met.

A Scrappy has to be:

Not all Scrappies are doomed to their status. If the writers notice what's happening, they may change the character in order to make sure they are no longer hated, give them a tragic death scene, simply send them away, turn them into a villain in a reboot or adaptation and have the more popular characters beat them up, or at the very least show that the other characters are as annoyed by them as the fans are. In a few rare cases, a Scrappy will be replaced with a Replacement Scrappy; in this case, fans may be so irritated by the new character that they will retroactively find virtues to the old Scrappy.

This is an Audience Reaction, more based on the fandom than the character itself. The visceral response to The Scrappy can baffle other fans who don't take the character as seriously, or even sympathize with him or her.

As a result, dear reader, tread carefully: fans aren't necessarily always right. The catharsis from violently cutting into a character with a grating voice or an irritating tic may be cathartic for some, and extremely disturbing for others. This is a place to document a phenomenon, not to argue a character's merits, lack thereof, or vent.

Please only post examples of the fandom hating a character; posting Personal Scrappies could get messy, especially if the Scrappy is in at the center of a Fandom Rivalry. Die for Our Ship entries should also be placed on that page only, though someone could be a Scrappy because of that reason.

If the majority of the characters are scrappies (especially the main characters) then expect the audience to utter the Eight Deadly Words.

Contrast Ensemble Dark Horse, an unexpectedly popular (minor or secondary) character, and Unpopular Popular Character, a character hated or disliked In-Universe but loved by the fandom. Compare and contrast Base-Breaking Character, where one part of the fandom thinks a character is the scrappy but at least a sizable chunk like them. If the scrappy dies or suffers in some painful way where the audience actually starts to sympathize with the character, then it becomes Alas, Poor Scrappy. Not to be confused with Cute Bruiser which is the original meaning of the word scrappy.

No Real Life Examples, Please! The real world isnt a story with characters that could potentially make it worse. We also ask that you wait 6 months after a character is introduced or becomes hated before adding a character as an entry, to cut down on kneejerk reactions.

Examples subpages:

Other examples:

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Comic Strips

Barry from Curtis. The author clearly intended his antics to just be normal kid-brother grade asshattery, but they're usually incredibly mean-spirited and deliberately designed to provoke Curtis, so that Barry can then sob to his mother that big mean ol' Curtis is trying to hit him for no reason at all, whereupon she will give Curtis chores to do for trying to hit his sweet, innocent brother, and Barry ice cream for being a Manipulative Bastard. Diane lacks the pattern recognition to notice that Curtis always has a very detailed description of the transgressions she doesn't believe Barry committed.

For Better or for Worse: Anthony back together with Elizabeth after years of him mooning after her while married to another woman and his outrageously inappropriate behavior during the Going After, and then ending the strip with their wedding. Words cannot describe how much these things (among other aspects of his character) made the comic's readerbase despise him even more than they did before then. How bad is the hate for Anthony, you might ask: Eric blatantly cheated on Elizabeth multiple times while they were living together and was completely smarmy and unapologetic after they broke up; when she went to pick up the last of her things from his place, he acted like he should be forgiving her for the failed relationship. And even still, it seems most of the fans would have rather seen her get back with Eric than with Anthony.

Most Foxtrot readers tend to point towards Andrea when asked who their least favorite character in the strip is. Most of this is due to how overbearing she often is towards her kids (going into Moral Guardian freak mode over the slightest things), her being very hypocritical at times and falling into the same pitfalls she criticizes everyone else for, and seldom acknowledging her own personal flaws, which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that she is almost always treated as though she is right about everything (even when she is clearly not) and always getting the last word/laugh.

Fanfic

Music

Person Man in They Might Be Giants' song "Particle Man" is clearly intended to be the Scrappy of the comic book the song is about.

Radio

Ralph Cirella on The Howard Stern Show. Howard once responded that Ralph gets more hate mail than a Ku Klux Klansman who is a frequent caller to the show.

Software

Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant animated paperclip assistant, has become the Scrappy of business software history. In some versions of Office, as soon as you wrote the word "Dear", he would pop up and ask if you needed help writing a letter, complete with tapping sound effects. And if you actually did ask him for help, you found out that he was nothing more than a glorified search function.

Sports

Izzy of the 1996 Olympic Games is considered one of the least popular Olympics mascots ever. His design is obnoxious and baffling; most people simply passed him off as a "giant blue sperm with legs." His video game wasn't even any good and played like a bad Sonic clone. Not enough? The character was unpopular enough that Izzy's Quest for Olympic Gold, a 30-minute-long animated special that stars Izzy as the main character and aired on TNT, was never rerun after its initial airing and is literally impossible to find online as a result. That's right, nobody liked him enough to bother preserving the special!

Digger, the mascot for NASCAR on Fox coverage from 2008 to 2012. He was greatly criticized for the ways in which he was used. Though it was at one time commonplace for networks to create mascots for sports coverage to incorporate an educational and entertaining element into their coverage, which was the case with Peter Puck, Digger was created purely to add entertainment to the NASCAR on Fox broadcast and reach out to a younger audience. Some NASCAR fans accused Fox of dumbing down and fluffing its coverage in order to gain revenue from Digger merchandise sales. Despite continuous outrage from the NASCAR fan community, as well as talk from the NASCAR community that the Fan Council was not pleased with the situation, Fox did not announce any plans to drop the usage of the characters, and even had posted pictures of holiday-themed versions of the Digger die-cast in 2009 and 2010. In response to the comments, in 2010, the Digger cartoon was not shown during pre-race shows and Digger appeared less often at the bottom of the screen. Throughout the 2011 season as well as the 2012 Budweiser Shootout and Daytona 500, Digger appeared very sparingly, usually only during commercial bumpers. Starting with the 2012 Subway Fresh Fit 500 all appearances and references to Digger were removed from the broadcast completely. However, nods to it occasionally came up (for example, at the Talladega race in 2014, when a track-level camera had a car drive over it, Darrell Waltrip commented that he hoped that nothing had happened to Digger, to which Mike Joy responded, "Digger's retired").

Tabletop Games

Theater

Little Red from Into the Woods. She doesn't get any noteworthy songs, her character is fairly one-dimensional and boring, and she's far less important to the plot than the other principals. In fact, you could probably remove her from the musical entirely without affecting too much, save one scene where she dares Jack to climb the beanstalk again.

Opera has quite a few of these; BBC Music recently did an article about it, in fact. They tend to be one-dimensional stock villains, especially ones who are ethnic stereotypes (such as Monostatos from The Magic Flute or Mime from Der Ring des Nibelungen) or Purity Sues/Stus (for example, Don Ottavio from Don Giovanni).

Toys

BIONICLE: Kiina, but only her portrayal in The Legend Reborn movie. The Genki Girl persona (which clashed heavily with how other story material depicted her), coupled with her "Yahoo"s (which have been exaggerated by the fandom to the point that's the only thing they remember her saying) and shrill voice, made her one of the biggest and most hated Scrappies the fandom has ever known. Which is a shame, since those that read the books and comics know her true personality isn't like that at all. BIONICLE (2015) has the Skull Scorpio, generally regarded as perhaps the weakest sets of the toyline's reboot due to its big and clunky, gimmick-based tail clashing strongly with its otherwise sleek and slender design, as well as for its legs being immobile. As well, it shares many of the frowned-upon aspects of its entire wave, such as a reused mask and somewhat garish colors. Ketar from the series' second year for his awkward build and function, as well as his mess of a color scheme. However, in some fans' eyes, he has been Rescued from the Scrappy Heap by the Animated Adaptation, and because many feel that uniting him with that year's Pohatu, another figure with a shaky reputation, improves both toys.

Fans of Monster High despise Hoo-Dude for his annoying personality (basically a male Plucky Comic Relief version of Frankie Stein without any of her charm or likability), irritating voice, and stupid, bizarre character concept (even for a franchise that thrives on them). The fact that Frights Camera Action! gave him a very forced prominent role (mostly consisting of him doing stupid Jar Jar-esque things and shouting the obvious) did not help and only deepened the hate. It's even believed that his first official doll was bundled with a limited edition of Ensemble Dark Horse Scarah because nobody would want to buy him on his own.

Kennedy from My Scene gets a lot of negative reception from fans for being made as an obvious replacement for Barbie. The fact that both characters were paired up with River as well as sharing similar personality traits only adds fuel to the fire.

Adult Thomas Wooden Railway fans have a special disdain for items that are not based on aspects from the television series or the The Railway Series books and are created specifically for the range, as well as items that use more plastic than wood. An item that gets the most disdain from them in particular is the Bubble Loader, a destination that involves loading bubble liquid.

The vast majority of the Transformers fanbase seems to loathe Bumblebee for his Spotlight-Stealing Squad tendencies in the toyline. It's more likely these days for a line to have at least two Bumblebees than to have any kind of Megatron, and they're often shipped as the majority of a case assortment. At first this was acceptable because he was popular enough among the kids that 'Bee toys vanished from shelves quickly, but sometime around 2010, Bumblebees became so saturated that every kid who wanted one owned one, leaving countless Bumblebees sitting on shelves and leaving no space for later waves that might carry more interesting figures. Of the bunch, the movieverse Bumblebee gets the most hate. He's the mascot of the base-breaking films, he's a pretty Flat Character, he receives nearly as many toys as the venerable G1 Optimus, and most of those toys just 'Bee with a slightly different pattern of yellow and black paint. Worst of all, he also pretty much forever locked in Bumblebee's design as "yellow and black muscle car" and ensured that Bumblebee toys from other lines now have to look the same as the dozens of Movie 'Bee toys already out there. Even the Masterpiece release of G1 Bumblebee got some scoffs. Hasbro appears to have eventually noticed this, and the Generations toyline, which is aimed mostly at adult fans of G1, has been entirely devoid of Bumblebee figures for years.



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