Only the Creator Does It Right

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

This is Creator Worship taken Up to Eleven. When someone makes a sequel to a popular work which they did not create, and it is completely savaged by fans.

Sometimes a Justified Trope because it may be that the original creator is the only one who knew the work well enough to "do it right."

Can be considered a form of Jumping the Shark, only with that trope, the creator him/herself can do it. If there's a Franchise Zombie, people may claim this.

Contrast My Real Daddy.

Examples of Only the Creator Does It Right include:

Anime and Manga

  • Gundam has some fans who insist that the Alternate Universe shows are all crap because Yoshiyuki Tomino had nothing to do with them (ignoring the fact that Turn A Gundam was not only his baby, but acknowledges everything that came before). Some take it a step further and say The Creator Does It Right Only When He's Depressed, savaging Gundam ZZ (made to clear up the gloom from Zeta Gundam).

Film

  • Jurassic Park III is held by some to be the worst film in the trilogy. Incidentally, it was the one film Steven Spielberg did not direct.
  • Out of the the four Batman films released from 1989 to 1997, the two directed by Tim Burton were considered the best.
  • The first two X-Men films were directed by Bryan Singer. The third, directed by Brett Ratner is considered by many fans to be a step down in quality. Add that the next X-Men which didn't divide opinions was produced and co-written by Singer...
  • Steven Spielberg turned down offers to direct Jaws 2. Most people feel that the sequels get worse with each subsequent film.
  • Several people in the Godzilla fandom find any of the movies not directed by Ishiro Honda to be inferior.
  • Became an issue on he set of Aliens. In addition to being a perfectionist and a bit of a Jerkass, James Cameron was also hated by the British crew for not being Ridley Scott. Fan reaction to the film, however, was more enthusiastic.
    • Cameron ended up on the opposite side of this trope after the second Terminator film.
  • Richard Donner directed Superman, and got fired halfway through Superman II. His cut of the sequel, which emerged in 2006, is generally considered better than the theatrical cut by Richard Lester. Of course, in this case it wasn't the name. There was a push to go Lighter and Softer that would culminate in the now disowned Superman III, and the Donner cut has less of the slapstick that was forced upon them.
  • The planned new Buffy the Vampire Slayer Continuity Reboot film without Joss Whedon is starting to receive this.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street is a good example, since the best-regarded installments have Wes Craven's involvement (the original and New Nightmare are written/directed by Craven, while Dream Warriors was co-written by him).
  • The Saw sequels since the departure of creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan are highly regarded as significantly inferior to the original trilogy, with the frequent exception of Saw VI.
  • An odd inversion with Star Wars. Many fans believe that The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were much better films than A New Hope in part because George Lucas took a more hands-off approach and left them in the hands of other writers and directors. These fans believe that the prequels would have been much better off if Lucas hadn't insisted on writing/directing all of them, in a case of We Love the Creator, but He Doesn't Do It as Well as Others Do.

Literature

  • The James Bond novels written after Ian Fleming's death are nowhere as famous as the ones Ian Fleming wrote. Of course, there wasn't really any other way around the Author Existence Failure.
  • Frank Herbert's Dune series was taken over by his son after the former's death, based on his father's notes. Despite this, many fans suggest stopping after Chapterhouse: Dune, Frank's final Dune work.
  • At least a significant portion of the Douglas Adams fans out there were not at all satisfied with And Another Thing.
  • Conan the Barbarian. To the most visible portion of the fanbase, the true Conan stories are the ones written by Howard and only by Howard. The post-Howard writers are referred to as "Conantics," and Internet Backdraft ensues if you admit to liking any of the books by Lin Carter or the others. (The films, curiously, don't receive nearly as much backlash.)

Live-Action TV

  • Supernatural. Many fans blame current showrunner Sera Gamble for the show's current less-than-stellar state. Note that the original creator still has some input on the show.

Video Games

  • Most infamous example: The Legend of Zelda CDI Games and Hotel Mario, produced by Phillips. As Nintendo Power put it, these games taught us that "nobody should make Nintendo games except Nintendo."
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution was starting to receive this...until the beta was leaked.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations was done without the creator's input.
  • Fallout 3 is hated by some of the more die-hard fans of the first two games because it was created by Bethesda Softworks and not Black Isle Software. Especially noticeable when you consider that Fallout: New Vegas was given a more accepting reception and that some of the old employees of Black Isle incidentally worked on it.
  • Most of the Legacy of Kain series is considered inferior to the original Blood Omen, since its designers - Silicon Knights - were cut out of the loop, the trademark essentially stolen by the publisher.
  • Many fans of the original Mafia dislike Mafia II particularly because very few of the original staff were on the Mafia II team, and most of them left during production.
  • Some fans / tropers think the Fire Emblem series has never been the same since the fifth entry, Thracia 776. The reason is due to the departure of series creator Shouzou Kaga.
  • Some people felt this way with both the newer Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games.
  • A common complaint of older Command & Conquer fans is that ever since Electronic Arts acquired Westwood Studios, the C&C franchise fell to continuous Executive Meddling that saw the Red Alert sequels descend further and further into ever-sillier and over-the-top Camp territory, Westwood dissolved and its assets absorbed into EALA (with around half of the original Westwood staff quitting in protest and forming Petroglyph), EA Games coming up with the controversial C&C: Generals subfranchise (which has not progressed beyond one expansion pack for the first and only installment), then brought C&C3: Tiberium Wars (which was more or less a Base Breaker on its own, be it for gameplay or plot-related reasons), and finally finished the job by doing away completely with C&C's signature gameplay characteristics in lieu for Dawn of War-style mechanics in C&C4: Tiberium Twilight - as in, it caused both sides of the already Broken Base to more or less put aside their quarrels and stand united in shared outrage at EA's latest Canon Defilement (Yeah, I think it's safe to say that they don't consider "EA Canon" as anything other than "EA Fanon").
  • Although they did get lots of positive reviews, Obsidian's two sequels to the BioWare games Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic still aren't ranked as highly as their predecessors.
  • The Dawn of War expansion Soulstorm was not made by Relic, and is coincidentally considered to be So Bad It's Good.
  • The Twisted Metal installments not made by SingleTrac and its sucessor companies (Incognito and Eat Sleep Play) are widely considered much inferior.
  • 343 Industries is getting this now that the Halo franchise has been sold to them from Bungie. Only time will tell, or at least until Halo4's release.
  • Max Payne 3 is getting quite a bit of this, due to Remedy having no real involvement with the series.
  • The Mega Man series gets this as well. First there were the official-but-subpar games for the PC and the Game Gear that were not developed by Capcom. Most of the later Mega Man X games also tend to receive this treatment, since Keiji Inafune intended to end the series after X5 but it was continued without his knowledge or input. And now that Inafune has left Capcom, faith in the series has now dropped to an all-time low.
  • What many fans think about the modern Ninja Gaiden games, and one of the reasons there is so much skepticism about the upcoming NG3—now led by Yosuke Hayashi, also director of the first two game's PS3 releases and of the Nintendo DS episode Dragon Sword. Any game not directed by Tomonobu Itagaki can only be a pale imitation. It doesn't help that before leaving Tecmo, Itagaki himself said that he didn't like Sigma, that NG2 was the definitive version of the game and that he was the only one legitimate to continue the series.
  • Silent Hill, which has become a Broken Base since the breakup of Team Silent and the series being outsourced to Western development teams. The absence of Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack work on Downpour is already getting this reaction from some.
  • Some of the fans of the first three Heroes of Might and Magic games, developed by New World Computing, aren't too thrilled about the fully-3D Heroes V (Nival Interactive) and Heroes VI (Black Hole Entertainment). Of course, there's also Heroes IV, the last game to be developed by NWC, which may fans simply ignore. The biggest complaint is not with the gameplay changes but with the fact that the storylines of the last two games have nothing to do with The Verse of the first three games.

Western Animation

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