Creator's Pet/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Creator's Pets in Western Animation include:

  • Many fans of Tiny Toon Adventures think Elmyra is one of the most annoying animated characters ever created. Her capturing Fifi LaFume didn't exactly help, either. Too bad the executives at Warner Bros loved her, and kept trying to get her her own show. Eventually, they had her co-star in a Pinky and The Brain spinoff, Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain, which earned her the wrath of more angry fans. It's even Lampshaded by the theme song: "It's what the network wants, why bother to complain?" Even the writers hated her.
    • Making this even more bewildering is the fact that Elmyra's entire joke as a character is that she's unbearably obnoxious.
  • Dulcy the Dragon in Sonic the Hedgehog (the "SatAM" version). Apart from just being there in season two without a proper introduction, getting a bigger part than most of the other freedom fighters, the writers try and squeeze her into as many scenes as possible, thus reducing Bunnie and Rotor to minor characters, and she gets the whole 'magic powers in a techno environment' deal (though that aspect was first established by the evil wizard Lazzar). There's also the questionable logic of Princess Sally trusting her safety (not to mention the safety of any other passengers) to riding a dragon who can't land without crashing, and falls asleep during flight.
    • Princess Sally herself also qualifies to a varied amount of the fanbase, due to her overwhelming utility in most missions (it was arguably her that rendered Rotor redundant due to her increased tech skills) and sometimes exaggerated use as a Foil and Romantic Interest for Sonic that rendered other characters needless extras (eg. Tails who in other portrayals was often Sonic's closest friend and ally). In the second season, aside from Dulcy and Antoine as comic relief, the show was near entirely revolved around Sonic and Sally's chemistry. Granted there is a lot more positive reception of Sally than Dulcy at times but she has rubbed off a lot of fans the wrong way. Sally and Dulcy were both stated to be favorites of Ben Hurst, who wrote the majority of Season Two.
      • Sally's much more of an obvious Creator's Pet in the comics. Read the first few pages of this, and try to NOT feel the Mary Sue vibes.
  • The Venture Brothers: Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick have stated that they will be intentionally invoking this trope by giving the widely-despised Murderous Moppets more screentime in the next season to spite the fans who hate them. Considering they're writing a Sadist Show, this could potentially redeem them as entertaining characters.
    • Dr. Girlfriend gave the Moppets a bit of a Take That, Scrappy! dismissal in the season four episode "Pinstripes Versus Poltergeists", mentioning that she found them increasingly annoying. The Monarch was extremely aroused by this display of hate...
    • Even before that, the Weslification of the Moppets paid off when they tried to threaten The Monarch due to orders from Dr. Mrs. The Monarch to keep him from leaving. It was very satisfying for him to remind them that, no matter how many henchmen they have crapping their pants, they have no business trying to intimidate a guy who picks fights with the likes of Phantom Limb and Brock Freakin' Samson as a form of entertainment.
      • What's really strange is that Doc Hammer hated the Moppets too, because he kept forgetting to write them into scripts. He only vowed to keep using the characters when he found out people hated them.
  • Herbert the elderly gay pedophile from Family Guy. He's a one-joke character (we get it, he wants to have sex with little boys) and is openly hated by much of the fanbase, yet he still gets to appear in a lot of episodes, and sometimes even get a really long musical number.
    • He also has one of the most annoying voices ever conceived on television.
    • Herbert even appears regularly in The Cleveland Show. It's specially bad when such a bad character appears in not one but two shows.
    • Brian Griffin also goes in this direction, thanks to his being a perceived Author Avatar who preaches at length about his liberal views and the show's universe often bends to accommodate his beliefs, as seen in one episode where Jesus Christ himself calls all religions "pretty much crap", prompting an off-screen Brian to say "Thank you!". This isn't helped by his obliviousness to his own flaws (such as the fact that if he gets a hard-on for a woman he'll say or do anything to bed her). However, the writers seem to have recognized this, and more recent episodes portray Brian as a pathetic figure whose only real friend is Stewie, the creator's other favored character.
  • Owen from the Total Drama series has become an increasingly blatant example, with a lot of focus put on him, his fart humor, and Annoying Laugh throughout all three seasons. He wound up winning the first season despite having won few challenges and being up against the very competent and fan favourite Gwen. In Total Drama Action, he was conveniently brought back onto the show after being eliminated halfway through, to the joy of all the other "good" characters, and even after that he is in the third season and made it to the merge, getting an unhealthy amount of focus before. On the whole, fans have not been pleased.
  • Cheese and Goo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends ended up becoming this for much of the older fans. They both eventually faded into the background however.
  • In The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson is considered this by some fans, primarily because as the rest of the cast falls into Flanderization, she remains the only consistently intelligent person in all of Springfield and gets to lecture everyone as to why her views are right and theirs are wrong with annoying frequency. By the tenth season or so, the writers seem to have picked up on how obnoxious she could be to the fans, however, and played up her hardcore activism for comedy.
    • Matt Groening has even admitted Lisa is his favorite character on the show and he will do anything to keep her from looking bad.
    • In Japan, however, Lisa is quite popular among viewers, so much that the show was re-marketed to make Lisa appear as the main character, rather than Homer or Bart. Instead, the Simpsons males are seen as Creator's Pets there, particularly Bart, who flies against the Japanese virtues of working hard and fitting in. Because of this, Bart is considered somewhat of a villain who always wins.
  • To dust off a very old example, there's Pudgy, Betty Boop's pet dog. In the later episodes, after the Hays Code cracked down on Betty's sexual nature, there was an increasing focus on Pudgy, and audiences were treated to heartwarming episodes all about Pudgy chasing his tail or something. Even Pluto was funnier than Pudgy ever was.
  • But Pluto was a Creator's Pet, too. Mickey Mouse may not have been the funniest Disney star, but he's still unmatched as a star of funny adventure cartoons—which makes it disconcerting that from about 1934, numerous "Mickey" shorts shunt him aside to give Pluto the spotlight. The most amazing thing is that from 1937, Pluto had his own series, yet he was still allowed to dominate Mickey's, too. It's gotten better nowadays, with Pluto and Mickey being kept more separate in their adventures (y'know, since there's more of an effort to give Mickey adventures these days?)
  • Mickey Mouse became a Creator's Pet to the Disney animation studio after Walt Disney decided to make the character his Author Avatar. At Walt's instructions, all the faults that made Mickey popular were removed, and his positive attributes were played up. The writers had very little freedom to do anything with the character, so they turned him into a Straight Man and paired him with other, funnier characters. (who at times push Mickey Out of Focus)
  • In King of the Hill we have Elroy, a.k.a. "Lucky". Lucky is a stereotypically ugly, middle-aged hill-billy with a drolling monotonous voice and no high-school education. His main source of income is filing lawsuits (regardless of their justification), as he practically refuses to get a job. He started off as a one shot character, but returns a season later, only this time he's become a regular character after Luanne falls in love with him. And he's still a homely, unemployed hillbilly who ends up living with the Hill family. There are times when the show hangs lampshades on his obnoxiousness, but, in general, the main cast just puts up with him (and the audience is expected to as well, since he ends up marrying Luanne).
  • Midway through Season Two, Drawn Together essentially became The Captain Hero Show. Practically every episode focused on him or featured him heavily, to the point where fans of other characters were sick to death of him. The writers admitted that they liked to give him stories, their justification being that the guy was so messed up that he would do absolutely anything. The more likely explanation is that the fact that he'd do anything made him ridiculously easy to write for, since it required no thought, effort, or consistency to just have him do whatever gag came to mind. Laziness is thus as likely an explanation as adoration.
  • Mr. Krabs of SpongeBob SquarePants, despite arguably being an Ensemble Darkhorse early in the show's run, is slowly grating on fans of the show, due to his Flanderization into an even bigger jerk than his "evil" rival Plankton.
    • It helps if you just imagine his behavior as an Actor Allusion, as his voice actor (Clancy Brown)'s most famous role was as The Kurgan, meaning the rivalry between the two restaurants becomes an analogue to the fight between the Kurgan and Macleod. In other words, the hatred may be justified.
      • On the other hand his Jerkass behavior is not just limited to Plankton; he now mistreats or shows a severe Lack of Empathy to most of the other, usually less-deserving cast members as well, such as Spongebob and Pearl, who were originally his Morality Pets in earlier episodes.
  • Ahsoka Tano didn't start off as one, but she'd go on to have a very complicated relationship with this trope.
    • Her debut in Star Wars: The Clone Wars had her pegged as a Scrappy almost immediately due to her bratty behavior and the potential Continuity Snarl her existence posed as the previously unmentioned padawan of Anakin Skywalker. However, it quickly became clear that her bratty behavior was intentional and throughout the course of the show, she went through a lot of growth as a character thanks to being shaped by her experiences during the Clone Wars, and it turned out that whether it gelled with previously-established continuity or not, she and Anakin played off each other well and learned a lot from each other. As a result, she went from a Scrappy to one of the franchise's biggest Ensemble Darkhorses to the point that when it turned out that she'd return in Star Wars Rebels, there was much rejoicing from the fandom.
    • Her role in Rebels was very well-received thanks to the maturity she shows as an Older and Wiser ally to the Ghost's crew, and her duel to the death against Darth Vader in the Season 2 finale was considered a fitting end to the character... Except it would turn out that she didn't quite die. In fact, her life was saved due to time travel, a concept that up until this point didn't even exist in Star Wars canon and is generally so poorly executed that it's widely believed to have only been introduced because showrunner Dave Filoni had grown too attached to her, and there was no other way she could believably survive a fight to the finish against Vader.
    • Fans didn't like this. At all. But while they believed this to be a severe disservice to the character they were willing to put up with it due to the goodwill they felt towards both Ahsoka herself and Dave Filoni, to the point that Ahsoka was often put up on a pedestal and held up as a proper example of a strong female character in comparison to the far more controversial Rey (who herself counts as an example of this trope to many people) who is often considered a poorly-written Mary Sue, while Filoni himself would be subject to tons of gushing Creator Worship at the expense of the likes of Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, and Rian Johnson.
    • However, it wasn't meant to last. Ahsoka would start constantly showing up in spinoff materials to the point of getting her own show, and has often found herself characterized as an overly wise and serene Jedi who many feel doesn't resemble the character they fell in love with and comes off as too detached and even arrogant for her own good. Not helping matters is the fact that she adheres strictly to the old Jedi code while interacting with Grogu, which many found out of character given how badly her relationship with the Jedi Order ended in The Clone Wars, and how she conducted herself as being unlike a traditional Jedi in the final seasons of the show and in Rebels. This was ultimately the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people, leading to Ahsoka's reputation souring in the eyes of many, with some even feeling that she's no better than the much-maligned Rey. Dave Filoni, likewise, had his reputation take several heavy hits thanks to the backlash against Star Wars shows he's helmed for various reasons, but that's a story for another time.
    • To make a long story short, Ahsoka went from being Rescued From the Scrappy Heap only to fall back into it (albeit in more of a Base Breaker sort of way) thanks to overexposure, questionable writing, and her creator being unwilling to put a decisive end to her story long after she's served her narrative purpose.
  • Taffy the babysitter from Rugrats was praised by all the characters in the show, but not so much love from the fans as she clearly existed so Amanda Bynes could star in another Nickelodeon show.
    • Really, most characters introduced in the second movie and onward are Creator's Pets. Kimi joined the group of babies that had mostly stayed constant throughout the series, and practically took control of the group, taking over Tommy's role of taking them on adventures and being the leader. Fans never really warmed up to her, but she pretty much became the most prominent baby on the show.
    • Actually, Kimi has a pretty sizable fanbase that her detractors like to ignore.
  • Cubert from Futurama was actually created to be one of these, apparently in direct reference to the former Trope Namer, and he was originally intended to be a sort of The Ace character, except he would still be hated and mistreated by the other characters. The last part came true, at least.
    • It helps that the writers were more in-tune than others in their profession. Originally Cubert was supposed to be the character who Lampshaded all the ludicrous aspects of the series, which he does in his debut episode. However, the writers realized how terribly annoying this was and transformed him into a standard Bratty Half-Pint TV Genius. And only used him in a couple of episodes thereafter.
      • Plus, in his debut episode, the rest of the cast takes an instant dislike to him and manage to get in a few good insults.
      • He is also downgraded from a genius to an insufferable brat who thinks he's smarter than he is. And still acts like a typical twelve year old.
  • She-Hulk in the '96 Incredible Hulk cartoon. No one really had a problem with her in Season 1, where she only appeared in two well-received episodes. Unfortunately, when the series was renewed for Season 2, Executive Meddling forced her on as a regular (with her name slapped onto the intro, no less) as part of their effort to make the series Lighter and Softer. Of course, her Ascended Extra status led to less screentime for others. (Rick Jones was outright dropped after the Season 2 premiere!) She-Hulk was also subjected to The Other Darrin, with Lisa Zane replaced by Cree Summer (the voice behind other Creator's Pet, Elmyra and Dulcy). All of this arguably could've been forgiven if not for her horrendous characterization. She consistently proclaimed how much she loved having Gamma power in front of Bruce Banner, ya know, the guy that wanted to cure his transformation. That was just one example of how obnoxious she could be. And let's not forget how she revealed the Hulk's identity to the world to clear Bruce of suspicion of attacking General Ross. (Considering there were no witnesses, any half-decent lawyer could've found some way - any way to get Bruce off the hook than that.)
  • The concept of the Creator's Pet was parodied brilliantly in Robot Chicken. It was done in a sketch featuring the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation discussing how to make the fans love Wesley Crusher, after the fandom has paid for a billboard threatening to ass rape Wil Wheaton to death. So, they decide to include a character so annoying Wesley would look better in comparison. When one writer suggests they try to make Wesley a better character, he gets thrown out of the room. The resulting episode has an annoying Great Gazoo rip-off called "Snirkles", who proceeds to bother Wesley by playing a "space banjo song" and then disappearing. The fans then change the billboard to say "Kill Wesley. Keep Snirkles."
    • Wil Wheaton, after seeing the sketch, tweeted that he would've loved to voice Wesley if they asked him to.
  • Randy Marsh from South Park is arguably becoming one of these. More plots are starting to revolve about him and/or utilize his Serious Business stance on trivial matters to the point where semi-main characters are now Out of Focus.
    • Trey Parker has explicitly said in the commentaries that he loves the character of Jimmy, which is probably why he gets an episode about Once a Season. Subverted, as fans seem pretty neutral towards him.
  • Roger from American Dad. His sociopathy is played for laughs, he has no regard for human life and he keeps getting the family in trouble for selfish reasons yet there would be whole episodes dedicated to assuring him that he is a valuable member of the Smiths.
    • He does have a huge fanbase though.
    • Reginald The Koala. He's annoying, very few fans tolerate him, and yet he got an entire Story Arc (in a show which tries its hardest to avoid these) where he tried to hook up with Hayley.
  • Some fans of Archer absolutely hate the characters of Cheryl and Pam. The two are constantly brought into episodes and situations where they don't belong and really serve no purpose other than to make jokes that Archer could have made on his own.
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