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Creator Backlash

Revision as of 15:51, 5 January 2021 by Lequinni (talk | contribs) (→‎Theater)

Fandom is an interesting entity. Nobody can quite tell how people will react to anything, making the creation of a popular work a crapshoot. However, it's assumed that most creators hold an equal or greater amount of affection for their work than their fans. After all, they had to actually make it in the first place. So obviously, anything that's popular must be something the creator likes, right?

"Ah, yes, I wrote 'The Purple Cow'
I'm sorry, now, I wrote it
But I can tell you anyhow
I'll kill you if you quote it!"

—Gelett Burgess

Not quite. See, the creators are just as human as everybody else and even if they're the origin of a particular work, that doesn't stop them from holding a negative opinion about it. This is what is referred to as Creator Backlash. It's the most high profile form of hatedom possible, since it's the very creator(s) of the work denouncing it. As they bring up their feelings of hatred for their work in interviews, public forums, and their other creations, it brings a certain amount of discord into being a fan when the very source has denounced it.

It can take on many forms and for many reasons. Many creators feel their work has been ruined by Executive Meddling. Perhaps the creator didn't really intend for it to become so popular, only making it to pay the bills and fund their more serious work (perhaps even getting forced into continuing it). Perhaps people completely miss the point. Perhaps it has them typecast to a sickening level. Perhaps they were going through a rough time while making it. Perhaps it has become their only work that is generally known, casting them as a "One-Hit Wonder" in the eyes of the majority. Perhaps it's all of the above.

It is quite common for creators who start early to simply grow out of their early work. Added to which is the common artistic trait of always wanting to move on: the criticism is just an expression of boredom; been there, done that.

Or perhaps they just really do hate the work they created after all this time. The reasons are as myriad as the reasons a fan might choose to like their work in the first place.

Not all Creator Backlash is permanent, though. They can just as easily choose to later embrace their work when they get over whatever was troubling them in the first place. This seems to be quite rare, however. When it does happen, it usually seems to occur after a lengthy period of time has passed between appearing on the show and the present.

Compare Old Shame, where the work in question neither caught on nor has many redeeming qualities in the first place; compare and contrast Bleached Underpants, where the work in question has... questionable history which its creators would like to dispose of. And then there's Alan Smithee, the famed director who lost creative control of his work. His filmography is a long one.

Not be confused with Creator Breakdown or Artist Disillusionment, though they can definitely overlap with this. Artist Disillusionment is against fans while this trope is against works. Magnum Opus Dissonance is a Sister Trope, as is Disowned Adaptation. And definitely not to be confused with creators getting their backs lashed.

Examples of Creator Backlash include:

Anime and Manga

  • Kyoko Mizuki and Yumiko Igarashi have come to despise Candy Candy, due to all the legal fights between each other caused by it.
  • The creator of the Slayers franchise, Hajime Kanzaka, stated a few times in interviews that, despite working on it, he had come to dislike the third season of the anime adaptation, which was one of the first divergences from the plot of the light novels. When the belated fourth season came out, a Continuity Nod noted this: on the plane chart that lists the numerous Big Bads of the verse, the two that were slain in the second season were dented, noting their destruction, but one of the higher-level demon lord's spots on the chart was intact—this particular lord, Dugradigdu, was slain in the third season.
  • Yoshiyuki Tomino is rumored to have despised working on Victory Gundam. In an interview, he outright said that people shouldn't watch it. This hasn't stopped several fans from naming it their favorite Gundam show.
    • He later warmed back up to Gundam though. He loved working on Turn a Gundam and even wrote a memoir about it and how it cured him of depression. Just as well for the cast, as characters tend to die messily when Tomino gets depressed.
      • Tomino's dissatisfaction mainly stems from different source: Victory was under production when Bandai bought up Sunrise, and their desire to sell toys resulted in a good degree of Executive Meddling, including the first 5 episodes of the show being reshuffled with very little new footage, resulting in what was intended to be episode 4 being shown as episode 1. This was done to expose audiences to the titular Victory Gundam, with the hope of boosting the toy sales. Worth pointing out is the manga Crossbone Gundam, which Tomino worked on shortly after Victory ended, and is one of the most hopeful entries into the franchise as well as a fan favorite.
  • In a series of translated blogs, Takeshi Shudo, original head writer of the Pokémon anime, stated how he disliked the Strictly Formula that was pushed upon it, which led to his resignation....and then after he left, he disliked how his own prize creations Musashi/Jessie, Kojiro/James, and Nyarth/Meowth of Rocket Dan/Team Rocket going way past Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain and into harmless territory.
  • Osamu Tezuka hated one particular episode of the 1960s Astro Boy anime so much that he personally destroyed the negatives before the episode could even be aired. Too bad a copy of that episode had already been shipped to the US and dubbed. This episode would later see a VHS release as "Astro Boy: The Lost Episode".
    • Also, there are a handful of stories he wrote that he permanently pulled from circulation (i.e. not available, even in compilation form) due to said stories not being up to his usual standards.
  • Hayao Miyazaki worked on preproduction of the animated film adaptation of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and considered it one of the worst experiences he ever had in his career.
  • For reasons unknown the author of the manga Hyouge Mono along with the editorial staff quit as consulting staff or distanced themselves from the anime project. And in a pseudo Alan Smithee fashion Yoshihiro Yamada also asked his credit be changed. He did not demand he take his name off the series nor did he adopt a pseudonym but rather changed the credit from Original Story to Original Concept (or Original Work to Original Scheme depending on the translation).
  • In-universe on two occasions in Bakuman｡. Mashiro and Takagi dislike Tanto, even though it has some degree of popularity among children and most of the other characters besides Eiji and Nanamine like it, as it's difficult for Takagi to write gags and not popular enough to get an anime. After some difficulty, they persude the editors to let them end it. Eiji eventually wants Crow to end, so he invokes his right of ending one series he hates to end it at the height of its popularity.
    • For the spoiler: it's not so much that he hates Crow, as that he hates that he may loose the ability to end it on his terms. He's stated he could easily keep it going for some time, but wants to end the highest rated manga at it's highest point, instead of simply going on and on.
  • Hirohiko Araki is known for being extremely critical of his early works, and has gone on record in interviews as slamming some of his early series, such as Baoh The Visitor and Gorgeous Irene. He even considers the first two parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to be an Old Shame of sorts, as it was at his request that the VIZ translation skips the first two parts of the series.

Comic Books

  • Robert Crumb has come to hate Fritz The Cat, especially after the movie came out and he felt it ruined his work forever, so in a follow up comic he killed Fritz off and discontinued the books.
    • His single most hated work, however, is the "Keep On Truckin'" comic; mainly because of how well-known and overused it became, how closely identified he became with it, and the fact that no one else realized it was supposed to be a satire.
    • In a live appearance, he spoke about how much money other people have made off of that one work, screening it onto posters, shirts, the works, none of which he ever saw a dime from. He advised the audience to never ever ever ever so much as mention the words Keep On Truckin to him.
    • He's also indicated that he resents the cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills because he was never paid for it.
  • Pierre "Peyo" Culliford hated The Smurfs, but continued to work on it because it was a Cash Cow Franchise. He had a lot of pressure from his publishing company, from the team that did the cartoon version, from some French TV animators (for those of you who remember French TV in the '90s: Dorothee), and of course from kids.
  • James O'Barr came to hate The Crow because it glorified revenge (though the fact that the comic's popularity and success indirectly resulted in Brandon Lee's death probably didn't help either). All royalties he received from the movie were donated to charity.
    • However, the Special Edition released in 2011 shows that now, O'Barr has come to terms with the work, seeing it as about true love and the importance of self-forgiveness. This is thanks in no small part to Brandon Lee's fiancée Eliza Hutton, with whom O'Barr became close.
  • Warren Ellis grew to despise Planetary and its fans after they constantly sent him e-mails asking when the new issue was coming out. However, the situation came to a boil after the death of Ellis's father. When he asked his fans not to contact him while he was in mourning, guess who kept on e-mailing him? There's probably a good reason the later issues were so slow to come out.
    • Though the backlash never seems to extend to the work itself, which never wavers in quality. He even wrote a final issue years after the series was thought to have been finished.
  • Dave Sim, the creator of Cerebus, gradually began to regret the female characters he created in the series (feeling they were idealistic and unrealistic depictions of women).
  • Similarly, Sonic the Comic writer Nigel Kitching expressed dislike for Amy Rose's development in the comic (which was actually the result of Executive Meddling insisting on having a more suitable female role model), resenting not having the freedom to develop her and making her one dimentional compared to her flawed male comrades.
  • Alan Moore seems to loathe all of his old works because of their hand in creating the Dark Age of comics.
    • It gets to an extent where he really has it in for DC. He has compared his relationship with the company to having a child you love, then having it kidnapped by gypsies in the night and every once in awhile they send you photographs of the kid working as a prostitute.
    • His loathing of the film adaptations of those same comics is particularly well-known; Moore goes uncredited in all.
  • At conventions, Kurt Busiek accompanies his signature on copies of Spider-Man/X-Factor: Shadowgames with the refrain, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
  • Although Joe Quesada was the true diabolical mastermind behind Spider-Man: One More Day, it was written by J. Michael Straczinsky, who absolutely hated it even as he was being paid to write it. He had asked that his name not be put on the infamous final issue (a request that was ignored) and tells people at conventions where to find Quesada as his own personal vengence.
    • JMS also hoped he could use OMD to undo "Sins Past", another story he wrote under protest (in his version the Goblin Twins were Peter and Gwen's kids; Quesada didn't like the idea of two teenagers having sex, and proposed the much less squicky idea of Osborn being the father). He was told he couldn't.

Fan Works

  • Post's reposting of his popular Teen Titans epic, "These Black Eyes", begins with this summary- "Noir, an incredibly overpowered Gary Stu, joins the animated Teen Titans. During his tenure with the heroic youngsters, many grammatical errors are made, many gross atrocities of the first-person narrative are committed, and a bunch of bloody drama is spilt in the name of lifeless nerdiness. Act One consists of his beating up the Titans and the Titans loving him for it. Act Two consists of predictable villains coming back to battle the Titans in a huge cataclysm of page length and sound effects. Act Three shall never again see the Internet because it sucks major donkey rectum. This has not been edited, but it has been preserved--not so much by me but by those few generous (depraved?) souls who felt this fic needed to stay in existence."
    • He deleted his earlier X-Men: Evolution fanfic, Between the Walls, for similar reasons. He never reposted it.
  • Since becoming a published writer, Cassandra Claire has disavowed The Draco Trilogy and it's no longer officially available. here it is.
  • Many writers have written a Lemon story, and come to hate it, as it becomes more reviewed, written and popular than any of their other works.
  • Greg X, one of the staff members of The Gargoyles Saga has, on several occasions, publicly disowned his TGS work. Many of his issues stem from story structure, to characterization (ask him how he feels about what TGS did to Demona some time), and too many fan-created characters who no one but their fan creator had an interest in. That, and he just prefers Greg Weisman's plans and comics. A very diplomatically written blog post can be found here detailing how he feels.
  • After completing the series and moving on to webcomics, Cassie "Alohilani" Thomas has several times affirmed her [dead link] dislike [dead link] of Both Syllables. Despite this, she still gets asked about it, to her great displeasure [dead link].
  • With thousands of reviews and numerous people saving docs of Fierce Deity's The Legend of Zelda fanfic series, you'd think that he'd be heartened. Nope, he wants nobody to ever mention those "pieces of crap" ever again, despite the latter story, "Eternal Ark" being reasonably written with an engaging plot and interesting original characters.
  • The Open Door by Academia Nut was abrupty declared dead despite its large fanbase on Stardestroyer and FF.net, mostly due to the author losing interest his own own story.
  • FF.Net and FIMFiction.net author Meowth Rocket/Meowth's Toon Dragon is known for his A New Face in Ponyville story, considered one of the better 'Human In Equestria' stories, as well as some decent Pokemon and Sonic stories and the famous Payback from a Pipe family guy fic. He's also written a couple stories that he considered so bad he purposely refused to transfer them over to his harddrive, all but erasing their existence forever.
  • Mark "Togashi Gaijin" Shurtleff was the author of several very well-written and even innovative crossover fics in the early 2000s, most notably Relatively Absent, an utterly original and stunningly crafted but sadly incomplete take on the tired Fuku Fic idea. However, in 2009 he abandoned fan fiction with a sudden and unexpected vehemence, wiping out all copies of his works everywhere he could reach and contacting anyone attempting to repost them to demand they cease. Years later, he is apparently still watching the Web and pouncing on anyone reposting his stories. These days the only way to get a copy of anything he wrote is to know someone who knows someone who has one they're willing to share.

Film -- Animated

  • Richard Williams was so devastated by what happened to his masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler that to this day, he absolutely refuses to talk about or even acknowledge the films existence to anyone.
  • Disney's Robin Hood. It was considered by the company to be a piece of crap, but it was and is quite a popular film.
    • They've never been excited about The Black Cauldron either, which only occasionally pokes its head out of the Disney Vault and gets little to no mention of even existing.
    • Don't forget Disney's Song of the South, about a Reconstruction-era freed slave telling folk stories to two young white children on a plantation. Yeah, they like to pretend that did not happen.
    • Walt Disney actually claimed he disliked how the Alice in Wonderland film turned out, that Alice herself had no heart, and was glad that it failed at the box office. In fact, unlike others of his films, it would never be re-released to theaters in his lifetime. It would not get a theatrical re-release until 1974, more than twenty years after its release!
    • Walt was also similarly uncomfortable with Dumbo, apparently. It was a low-budget, cartoon-like, hour-long movie that he had had very little to do with; and it ended up making more money than the high-budget, realistic, feature length films like Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi that he was heavily involved in. Never mind that it was released at a time when he was trying to prove that animation was more than just cartoons (see the second Fantasia example below). According to Neal Gabler, Walt dismissed Dumbo as "just one of those little things that we knocked out between epics."
    • Although Peter Pan fared better at the box office than Alice, Walt didn't care for that film, either, claiming that the titular character was unsympathetic and unlikeable. However, unlike Alice, Walt must have been able to look past his misgivings about the film and its characters to allow Peter Pan to be re-released to theaters during his lifetime, its first theatrical reissue (there were five in all) being in 1958.
    • The Pastoral Symphony segment from Fantasia initially featured a full-on 'darky' caricature named Sunflower as one of the 'centaurettes'. She was removed in 1969 and, despite the presence of old, uncensored prints, Disney denied her existence until the release of the re-mastered edition in 2000.
      • Speaking of Fantasia, Walt Disney mentioned the film when he appeared during the 1942 Academy Awards to accept the Irving Thalberg Award. Trying to hold back tears, he said "Maybe I should have a medal for bravery. We all make mistakes. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals." He was ashamed of Fantasia, not so much of making the film as of its pitiful box office performance. He felt that audiences were ready for a film like that in the wake of Snow White, but when it flopped (and was right on the heels of Pinocchio being a flop), Walt's self-confidence was rattled. Fantasia's performance discouraged Walt from making anything else too artistic, which was why any films made thereafter, such as Cinderella or Peter Pan, were safer, more mainstream fare.
  • Don Bluth dislikes his 90s films like Rock-a-Doodle and A Troll in Central Park as much as his fans do. In fact, he hated The Pebble and the Penguin so much that he actually removed his name from the film.
  • Orson Welles, who played Unicron in Transformers: The Movie, apparently couldn't even remember what it was called, and stated that his role was that of "a huge toy that does horrible things to other toys."
    • And he died five days after completing his work on the movie. That is some rapid Creator Backlash.
  • Dan Harmon, one of the screenwriters of Monster House, wrote a wonderful apology letter to a young girl after her mother, a friend of a friend, wrote him explaining the girl's nightmares over the movie, a letter in which he complained about the Executive Meddling on the movie.
    • "And next time Monster House is on, just remember that the guy that wrote it told you it was dumb."
  • Peter Sallis, voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit stated that he preferred the original shorts such as The Wrong Trousers to the duo's big screen debut in The Curse Of The Wererabbit, making him one of the movie's few critics. Nick Park has also stated that while he holds no regrets over the movie, he feels personally that Wallace and Gromit are better suited to the short films, rather than feature-length.

Theater

  • Henrik Ibsen was not happy about having to change the ending of A Dolls House. The term he used was "barbaric atrocity". Ironically, due to changing values, the original ending is now perfectly acceptable. The redo is something of a Writer Cop Out. He also did not react well when feminists began lauding him for the play's support of their movement, which he denied.
  • A similar thing happened with Pygmalion, which higher ups wanted to change the ending so that Eliza and Higgins to get married in the end so it could have a standard happy ending rather than letting Eliza leave Higgins to marry Freddy. Needless to say, George Bernard Shaw would not be happy about the musical adaptation.
  • The Broadway flop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner was Bernstein's last and least successful musical; he was so ashamed of it that he didn't let it be recorded in his lifetime. As with Saint-Saëns and "Carnival of the Animals," one number escaped the ban: "Take Care of This House." Years after Bernstein's death, a concert version was issued titled A White House Cantata.
  • Love Life, a vaguely similar (and somewhat more successful) musical Alan Jay Lerner wrote with Kurt Weill, could not be revived in Lerner's lifetime because of his personal disdain for it.
  • Gilbert and Sullivan really came to resent their trademark comic operettas, claiming they would have liked to have been remembered for their serious works, too.

Video Games

  • Factor 5, the people who made the Rogue Squadron games, reportedly got sick of making them by the time they finished the third one, and it shows. While working on Lair, someone on the staff made a public comment about being glad that they didn't have to make X-Wings or yet another rehash of Hoth. Lair, of course, didn't do so hot.
  • Something Awful forumers who run particularly popular Lets Plays tend to get antsy when they become notorious enough for Tropers to start Gushing about them in further depth than throwing up a blurb and a link on the LP page.
  • Will Wright defended the changes in SimCity Societies, saying that the series had gotten too complex, and that he enjoyed each one less and less. That didn't go over well.
  • Keiji Inafune, who played a large role in the Onimusha and Dead Rising franchises, has gone on record say that he absolutely hates his job and wants nothing more than to retire. He also constantly rants about how the Japanese gaming industry is in serious decline.
  • Masahiro Sakurai has said that he regrets aiming Super Smash Bros Melee so strongly towards the hardcore gamer crowd, making it inaccessible to newer fans, and calling it a mistake he wouldn't repeat again.
  • Both Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto and director Eiji Aonuma have expressed their regrets in the production of The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. They don't dislike the game at all, but feel that it never turned out the way they had envisioned it. Miyamoto simply stated that he felt it was "missing something", and Aonuma felt that he didn't create the game that was intended to be "120% of what The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was".
    • Miyamoto wasn't exactly too fond of his involvement in Star Fox 64 either, as stated in an interview found in the official Player's Guide. Again, he didn't hate it, but felt it wasn't what he'd have liked it to be.
    • Amusingly, Miyamoto isn't very fond of Toad.
  • Portal's writer, Erik Wolpaw, is absolutely sick of "The Cake Is a Lie" jokes that spawned nonstop from the game. He said he wouldn't be making any references to it in Portal 2....
    • ...which turned out, ironically, to be a lie. There are TWO references to cake, but they's subtle, easily missed and nowhere near as in-your-face as the original references. Apart from that, there are no more cake jokes, even to the point of removing cake icons from existing test chambers that re-appear in the second game.
  • Following their departure from the Crash Bandicoot series, original developers Naughty Dog have given mixed feelings towards other developers' attempts at recreating the franchise. Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells states that "It's a little bit like watching your daughter do porn". On the other hand, character designer Charles Zembillas actually liked Crash's redesign at the hands of Radical Entertainment, actually desiring further involvement in the series while co creator Andy Gavin at the very least praises Crash Bash for staying true to the original games.
  • Chris Avellone, one of the original creators of Fallout is known to be openly hateful of the more Black Comedy portions of the canon and the fact that games like New Vegas give the impression of a recovering world, claiming that the whole point of the series was to be a barren, post apocalyptic wasteland where death and anarchy reign and altuirism and all other good qualities are either dead or backfire horribly. He's vented his anger in the Fallout Bible, where he unceremoniously destroyed much of the lighthearted content of Fallout 2, and has threatened to do the same to New Vegas.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone are said to have disliked the South Park video games published by Acclaim during the show's early run, despite the fact that they were closely involved with their creation.

Webcomics

  • Kittyhawk of Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki fame started out with a fairly popular webcomic called The Jar. Sometime around when she was having problems with her domain because of traffic, she took the whole website down. During the downtime between it and SGVY, she came to really, really hate The Jar and absolutely refused to put the archives back up. This seems to have faded recently due to her now selling it on CD format.
  • In-story example: Justin in Punch An' Pie submitted an absurd story about a bat with a gun to a publisher. They published it. People ate it up. Now he's one of the most popular writers around, and he's sorry he ever wrote that story.
  • Before Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw gained fame as a games critic, he wrote several webcomics. In his words, they "came out of a dark time in his life from which he has determinedly moved on without a backward glance."
    • Moreover, just to make sure no-one would be fooled into thinking he cares about his old works, he has gone on to officially disown them, including every webcomic he ever made, every game made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent and every work of fiction he has written before the age of twenty, encouraging his readers to dispose of them in the nearest possible natural disaster should they ever get their hands on his old work.
  • This is the rule, not the exception, for virtually any Matt Wilson production (namely, High Score and its animated spin-off Bonus Stage) to date.
  • A humorous parody happens in an issue of Mac Hall. During a con recap in which about twenty webcomic artists are on stage at once, the others give non sequitur-esque answers (Sluggy Freelance was my grandma's nickname), Ian simply holds up a sign that has "YOUR MOM" on it.
  • Josh Lesnick seems to feel this way about his older webcomic Wendy, seeing as he's just recently taken the whole thing offline since it's already been there long enough in his opinion. The characters themselves, however, continue to live on in comics such as Girly and whatever22.
  • This is actually the reason for the creation of Exterminatus Now; the four writers once made a Darker and Edgier version of Sonic the Hedgehog by adding Warhammer 40,000 elements, and later realised how stupid the concept was and decided to make fun of it.
  • The creator of Arcana abandoned the project completely and reinvented her online identity so bitter fans wouldn't bother her about it. Or So I Heard from those who know her in Real Life.
  • Pretty much the main reason RPG World ended prematurely when it was on the verge of finishing. Creator Ian J. came to resent the direction he had taken the comic and in the end just flat out abandoned it. He did offer anyone interested to come finish it, but when the fans voiced their opinion he pretty much told them to "F** K OFF!" and retracted the offer. Leaving the series to rot with No Ending.
  • Rick Fortner and Rebecca Burg hate the original Job Hunting, the second story in their A Loonatics Tale series. The final form was hastily edited with unfortunate restrictions on the amount of weapons and violence (ie there couldn't be any) in order to make it fit a school assignment. They're currently drawing a remake, Rehired, which is the canon version. They use the original version as a barometer of peoples' ability to detect quality and/or speak frankly; anyone who says they liked the original Job Hunting lacks the capacity to offer meaningful criticism.
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl, The author got rather fed up at the unsettling number of fan characters in the community and the amount of focus they got.
  • Jay Naylor has expressed his disdain for his old comic Better Days:
 

"Better Days was created when I was a very different person. I had very different views, values, and priorities, and I evolved as a person as I was doing Better Days over the course of six years. There's a lot in Better Days that I wouldn't include if I was doing it today. There's a lot of things that I wrote that I wouldn't have written that way, now. I don't like looking at the old pages. I don't like looking at the old art. It's embarrassing and bad in my eyes. I don't like lingering on the past. It's enough that I've left the archive in place, and find myself having to explain some of the themes and events depicted in Better Days, by a much younger, less mature creator, compared to who I am today."

 
    • Of course, considering that he can't seem to help revisiting those situations in his current comic Original Life, to the point that his new comic is looking more and more like the old one, one has to wonder if he wasn't just trying to throw off some of the bad reputation those particular writing decisions had brought him, as opposed to sincerely regretting or disagreeing with them.
  • It is no secret that Tim Buckley ultimately came to utterly despise the characters of Scott the Linux guy and his pet penguin, Ted. Not only has he effectively writtem them out of the comic, he's gone to increasingly severe lengths to ensure no one knows who they were or even remembers that they even existed, up to and including banning anyone who says that they do remember them or even mentions them in any way.
  • James Kochalka discusses it with his son in this American Elf comic.

Web Original

  • Matt Wilson, creator of Bonus Stage, seems to hate his most famous creation, or at least, all of the fans. He had stated after the end of the series that he hardly, if ever, plays video games any more. Also, he is embarassed by the poor animation quality of many of the episodes, and doesn't find a lot of the jokes funny anymore.
  • McMaNGOS, creator of the "This Video Contains Win" YouTube Memetic Mutation, has apparently come to despise it, to the point of irreversibly replacing the audio with some random song that nobody knows of. This may have something to do with all the imitations it has spawned, and the fact that the fad was forced by McMaNGOS making sequels and demanding that people follow in his footsteps (although some of them were pretty funny).
  • This tends to occur to a lot of YTP videos. Most poopers despise the "PINGAS", stating that it is overused and not funny anymore, and Stegblob has said that he only keeps the "Hotel Mario (nouns replaced with PINGAS)" video up because his fans love it so much. Lots of people have incredibly popular poops that they just made as a test or one of their older videos that are filled with things such as unoriginal humour, memes and poor editing. Often, they edit the video title to be something like, "THIS VIDEO SUCKS, STOP WATCHING IT" and block it with annotations.
    • Ironically audioswapping a video and plastering annotations over it has become a small fad too.
  • Alvin-Earthworm, creator of Super Mario Bros Z, has been incredibly annoyed by fans constantly asking him to work on new episodes, to the point where he has completely stopped working on the series. He claims that it's not forever.
    • He wasn't lying. He's started making him again and most of his fans are listening, seeing as it seemed like they made him quit the internet.
    • He still updates his Deviant ART account, although you may wish to be cautious before observing it. The comments sections still partially consist of SMBZ fans asking for more.
      • He created a second account as well. His first post stated that so much as mentioning SMBZ on that account is a blockable offense.
  • Not the straightest example, but Brian Kendall has apparently a love/hate relationship with that one flash movie he made. Much of the "hate" part comes from the amount of effort he thought he could put more into this movie.
  • Serris, the creator of the Darwin's Soldiers universe has explicitly stated that he hates the rebooted Furtopia RP and he will not write an ending to it. When asked what he hated about it, he had this to say:
 

Serris: One of the characters is a Fur-dragon in a diaper! Scenes of diaper changing and baby care do not fucking belong in a dark high octane RP! And of course, it under-emphasized the role that the terrorists played in the invasion and gave too much spotlight to the rogue scientists.

 
  • John Solomon, the webmaster of the "Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad" blog, came to loathe his own creation. He made it perfectly clear that he loathed fanboyism, even when it was his own, and was bothered by fans parroting his opinions. He finally deleted the blog entirely. When he learned that The Bad Webcomics Wiki had archived his reviews, he got a little peeved.
  • A Something Awful user who claims to have created the "Deal With It" meme posted in the comments of the Know Your Meme article that he hates how widespread it became and regrets ever posting it.
  • Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, the creators of Marble Hornets - better known as 'the guys who play J and Alex Kraile' - absolutely HATE the 'Gimme 20 Dollars' meme that spawned from a parody of one of their entires. It's now impossible to go into a Slender Man video without seeing at least one reference to that song in the comments. Troy and Alex have said they refuse to acknowledge the meme in their videos, and have asked fans to stop referencing the joke to them in emails and responses.
    • The boys from Everyman HYBRID, however, don't seem to mind, and in fact referenced the meme in the episode One step forward, two steps back. (Although Jeff, the writer of the series, said this scene was written a lot earlier in the series and didn't know it would become so hated.)
  • It is not uncommon for creators of Abridged Series to grow dissatisfied with early episodes as their series progresses and they become better writers/editors/etc. Often they will remake their old episodes with updated voice acting and visuals, and sometimes the old episodes are completely rewritten.
  • "You internet types ruined Trogdor! Just like you did zombies, pirates, ninjas, and Strong Bad! Er, wait, no. Yeah!"
  • Chuggaaconroy to Steve.
  • Mixermike662 was once a rather respected part of the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fandom, most notable for creating "Fluffy Ponies" - pony characters with Baby Talk speech patterns and extremely fluffy fur. But then massive amounts of "fluffy abuse" stories started flooding the image boards, in which people wrote gruesomely detailed descriptions of slaughtering and torturing fluffy ponies (similar to what happened to yukkuris in Touhou fandom). This has led Mixermike662 to leave the MLP fandom entirely.
  • Parodied by The Onion in "YouTuber Cringing While Watching Amateurish Early, Current Work", featuring Jacksepticeye.

Western Animation

  • Chuck Jones grew to hate almost all of his pre-1948 cartoons (sans certain shorts like The Dover Boys), so much that he said if he had the choice he would have burned the negatives to all of them.
    • Additionally several WB staff such as Frank Tashlin expressed dislike for Porky Pig, due to having less flexibility and humor value compared to zanier characters such as Bugs Bunny. According to animator Mike Fontanelli, this resentment still stands with many modern executives at Warner Bros and is partly why the character is so sparsely used in revival features and merchandise.
  • The Warner Bros. animators grew to dislike much of their early work, especially the sappy Disney-like cartoons and Buddy cartoons they made from the mid-to-late 30s.
  • Shamus Culhane disliked his sole Popeye cartoon "Popeye Meets William Tell", citing it as "an interesting failure" in his autobiography, mainly because he never wanted to make a regular Popeye cartoon in the first place, instead wanting to make a short centered around Wimpy, which was vetoed by the Fleischers.
    • Culhane was also not proud of how his animation on Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels was ruined by sloppy inkers and bad in-between work, and that he would have quit if it wasn't for his contract.
    • Culhane also despised working on the Hearst Studio Krazy Kat theatrical shorts that he did inking work on. His humble feelings on them are as follows;
 

"The films were atrocious, the worst crap you can imagine. They never used the characters. Offisa Pup rarely appeared, Ignatz Mouse was not in love with Krazy;[1] they never used the desert landscapes. The staff just batted the stuff out as fast as they could for something like 750$ apiece."

 
  • Max Fleischer considered Mr. Bug Goes to Town to be a failure, and refused to adknowledge the film as one of his achievements in a 1950s interview—although it may have been because it was the film that contributed to destroying Fleischer Studios and getting him booted out; the fact that he and David Fleischer had a terrible falling out while they were making the film probably didn't help matters either.
    • He also hated the Made-For-TV Out of the Inkwell cartoons, and was horrified when he first watched them.
  • Strange as it sounds, some sources claim that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hated Scooby Doo, and only kept the show running because of how insanely popular it was.
  • Both Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones grew to hate the cartoon "The Daffy Doc", not because they thought it was a bad cartoon, but because it used an iron lung as a gag prop during a time when polio deaths were on the rise.
  • Hugh Harman of the Harman and Ising claimed late in his life that he grew to hate all but three of the shorts he made--"The Old Mill Pond", "Blue Danube", and "Peace on Earth".
  • Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair of ReBoot fame were once famous for the computer animation in the Dire Straits Money For Nothing music video. They were proud of their work... at the time, but they despised that they had the suffix title of "Those guys who did Money for Nothing." They showed their feelings in an episode of ReBoot, where two look-alikes for the CGI movers from the video audition at Enzo's birthday party, only to get sandbags dropped on them from high offstage.
  • Donald F. Glut was one of the few members of the Transformers Generation 1 cartoon staff who openly expressed distaste for the series, lambasting its quality as actual art (including the episodes he wrote) and claiming that he only worked on it for the money.
  • J. Michael Straczynski expressed a similar opinion for his work on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't seem particularly proud of the early seasons of South Park, which had the highest ratings of the show's run, but came before its metamorphsis into a satire on current events and pop culture.
    • In fact they hate season 2 so much that they didn't even do commentaries on the DVDs like they did for the other seasons.
  • The Simpsons
    • "The Principal and the Pauper," which retconned Principal Skinner's past, saying instead he had assumed the life of the "real" Skinner and then brushed these revelations under the rug in a blatant reset button. Both Groening and Skinner voice actor Harry Shearer have publicly criticized the episode. The later "Behind the Laughter" episode referred to this one as "gimmicky" and "nonsensical."
    • "A Star Is Burns," a crossover with The Critic forced upon the show by the network. Groening removed his name from the episode in protest.
  • Disney director Wilfred Jackson was so ashamed of his first directorial effort, a Mickey Mouse short called "The Castaway", that he vowed never to make a film that didn't feel like a Disney picture again.
    • Walt Disney (the man) hated the 1935 Silly Symphonies short "The Golden Touch" after he finished it he never directed a short again. According to Jack Kinney's autobiography, he allegedly blasted an animator over a mistake and the animator shot back that he was the one who directed The Golden Touch. Walt stormed out—but came back later and angrily warned him to never, ever mention the cartoon again.
    • Walt also had some dislike of Goofy, as mentioned in Neal Gabler's biography on Walt. According to Gabler, Walt "threaten[ed] constantly to terminate [the Goofy series of shorts] before relenting, largely to provide work for his animators."
  • Thurop Van Orman HATED a handful of episodes from the second season of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. So he added a Laugh Track to them, along with a "drawn in front of a live audience" gag.
  • The Bananaman cartoon series was hated by just about virtually every cast member that starred in it, as well as Steve Bright, who wrote the Bananaman comic strip. To a lesser extent this also applies to the strip's original artist, John Geering, who liked the series overall but wasn't fond of how his characters had been redesigned.
  • Tex Avery expressed a dislike for his character Screwy Squirrel, even going so far as to kill him off for real at the end of Screwy's fifth and final short.
  • An in-universe example from Rocko's Modern Life: Ralph Bighead has Wacky Deli created so that he will be released from his contract in order to become a real artist. It doesn't work.
  • John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame has warned his fans not to study his cartoons from the original series. He summed it up saying "For one thing that we did right, there was a million of mistakes". However, when using examples of a well-constructed story and good dialogue, he uses the cartoon "Stimpy's Invention" quite a lot.
    • He was so embarassed for having directed the "Nurse Stimpy" episode due to the heavy amount of editing it went through, he ended up crediting himself as "Raymond Spum" at the title card.
    • He also doesn't like the Adult Party Cartoon episode "Fire Dogs II" for its slow pacing and abysmal timing, although he thought the story and characterizations were fine.
      • In fact, he dislikes the fact that the whole series had to be "adult", the adult content actually being forced on him by the network (while he's constantly blamed for having Protection From Editors and thus creating the unpopular adult series by his own choice), so it could stand next to the likes of Family Guy or South Park. When recently asked if he'd like to continue making Ren and Stimpy cartoons, he replied with "yes, but just the ones for kids".
    • The Ripping Friends is also apparently very hard for him to watch because of all the Executive Meddling.
  • One seems to get that impression watching the 3rd Family Guy Star Wars special It's A Trap! with Stewie quickly mentioning they were going to do Return of the Jedi and Peter sighing and saying "Let's get this over with." followed by the opening scroll turning into a massive rant about how they (they being Seth MacFarlane and the rest of the crew) never wanted to do this nor Something Something Something Dark Side and only did so so Seth could do other projects without them (them being 20th Century Fox) complaining.
    • On the other hand, Family Guy does a lot of throwaway lines, so it's hard to tell if they really meant it.
    • Judging by Quagmire's epic Take That, Scrappy! rant to Brian in a season eight episode the writers really, really regret "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" and its moral that "religion is for idiots".
    • Recent episodes of Family Guy use tons of Self-Deprecation gags about the show or other works the creators are responsible for (the Star Wars specials also include several jibes to Seth Green's Robot Chicken). Granted given the overall tone of such gags (and the fact they are expressed by less than sound individuals in the show) it may also count as Take That, Critics!.
  • Phil Vischer - upon giving an interview regarding his new series, Jelly Telly - mentioned that he now considers his earlier series, Veggie Tales, as something of a failure because it stressed basic morals while largely downplaying the Christian beliefs behind those morals; Vischer says that Jelly Telly was created to rectify this problem.

Miscellaneous

  • Mild case: Vincent Connare, designer of the "Comic Sans" typeface, sympathizes with its detractors.
    • Oh. Now I feel guilty. Not that guilty, but guilty nonetheless.
    • Interestingly, he "credits" the lettering on Watchmen (done by artist Dave Gibbons) with part of the inspiration for the font. Dave Gibbons is... conflicted about it.
  • On Deviant ART, Fan Art naturally gathers more popularity than original art because of the fans of the respective series. This could mean that a single good piece of fanart can be the single most popular item in a user's entire gallery. Reactions to this vary from indifference, to bitterness, to internet drama.
    • Likewise with writers who write one comedy story which becomes very popular, and their new and serious stuff gets ignored from then on.
      • There's at least one example of an artist being rather dissapointed that they got a Daily Deviation... on a joke piece they made ABOUT Daily Deviations. Understandable in that they had so many examples of attractive, interesting art in their journal that had always been overlooked.
    • Also, Stamps - little things (made to look like postage stamps), which usually have something like a quote, or a refernce to a show, or a particular stance on something (you name it, there's probably a stamp for it), which generally get a lot more favourites and comments than any other work in someone's gallery.
    • This is also often the case for YouTube users who upload an extremely popular fad video that took no effort, only for it to overshadow their more elaborate videos.
      • Great example is Dom Fera, of Lazer Collection fame. The series often completely overshadows the rest of his work.
        • He expressed this sentiment in Lazer Collection 4. That said, he doesn't hate the Lazer Collection, he just thought it was ridiculous that people expected him to put out 4 so soon after 3.
  • Speaking of Deviant ART from above, moderately-popular Deviant ART cartoonist BrokenTeapot initially used to draw comics and characters involving Fetish-Fuel driven material, mostly related to Hypnofetishism as either his own pieces or fan-commissions. Somewhere along the line he has since become ashamed of them in general, critisized the attraction and attention he had gotten from said fetishes, and went on to draw almost predominantly video game-related parody one-page comics. Later, he would begin a Castlevania-inspired spoof called "Nosfera" which become relatively popular. Soon after eventually finishing the ongoing comic, he would go on to write a surprising post about how it "sucked" and stated he would begin doing it over. He's currently in the process of doing just this.
  • Illusionist David Copperfield is reportedly not happy with his 10th TV special "The Bermuda Triangle." On a DVD commentary he mentioned that he didn't like the final illusion (to be fair it is VERY hokey) and that it came "during a very rough part of my career." However, the special did feature one of Copperfield's signature tricks...The Death Saw.
  • Albert Einstein considered the cosmological constant term he added to his theory of general relativity to be his "biggest blunder", as he put it in in an attempt to make his theory consistent with a static universe. Shortly after, Edwin Hubble published observations that the universe was in fact expanding, in accordance with the original theory of general relativity… However, as of circa 2000, a nonzero cosmological constant has become part of the standard model for cosmology, as there are stars that are older than the age of the universe as computed using original general relativity (if expansion is accelerating, then it was previously slower, and it would therefore have taken a longer time than predicted by original general relativity for the universe to expand to its present size).
  • Cracked.com's 6 Classics Despised by People Who Created Them.
  • Spen King, the designer of the Range Rover, said in an interview in 2004 that his creations had become "oversized toys for pretentious city slickers" and that people who drive 4x4s in town were "pompous and stupid". He added that his creations were "never intended as a status symbol but later incarnations of my design seem to be intended for that purpose".
  • The late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (also known as Ras Tafari Makonnen) disliked the eccentric Jamaican religion of Rastafarianism, which worshipped him as a god. A strong Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, he famously once implored the prime minister of Jamaica to "help these people" during a visit.
  • Cosplayers—particularly those who make their own costumes—do this quite often. It's not uncommon for such cosplayers to look back at their older cosplays and go, "what the hell is this?!", even if others find these cosplays to be impressive anyway. Doesn't help that they'll probably have photos of their cosplays floating around on the Internet.
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. They even created a website dedicated to getting people to drop it.
  • Surrealist artist Rene Magritte once titled a painting of a pretty blue sky with clouds "The Curse". Scholars have debated what kind of "curse" may have prompted that title, but some believe that it refers to Magritte being thoroughly sick of how his other works featuring pretty blue skies with clouds were the ones that were most popular.
  1. ↑ This is a mistake on Culhane's part, as it was the other way around in the comics
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