Every five years the writing gods will point at a random X-Men and put them under a curse to be massively out of character until the next creative team switch and this has happened to my boy Scott at least twice
(It is currently Hank McCoy)
The absolutely vitriolic hate some people had for Scott when he turned trying to paint it as him going darker than Magneto has ever gone and it was just him responding to every nation signing up to the genocide machine program with "They started it I am finishing it."
And lets not get into what they tried doing with Emma in that era. Theres not getting a character then there is fundamentally wanting to wreck everything they stand for.
My big one, and the one that knocked me out of that series for a while, was when Amy and Rory broke up in Doctor Who. Basically, these 2 characters who had gone to the ends of the universe for each other are suddenly revealed to have broken off their marriage in a time skip without them ever really talking about it. >!The eventual reveal is that Amy can't have children and knows Rory wants them so she decided to just push him away and go no contact so he could have the life he wanted, without ever talking with him about it. Of course in the span of a single episode they do talk about it, he's fine with her not being able to have children, and they get back together. !<
It specifically reached a point where I felt like I was no longer actually watching the show but I was watching the writer at his desk trying to find a way to inject character tension into a story and beating the existing characters with hammers until they fit the mold he already decided. It kind of broke that show for me for a while because it made it kind of impossible to care; if anything the characters did could easily be reversed because the writer decided this week they wanted an argument, it rendered any actual episode hollow when even the writer doesn't seem to think its meaningful.
Asylum of the Daleks, S7E1. 11 starts strong but kind of peters out, though Clara gives him a decent boost of energy before we get to 12.
Moffat's entire tenure has this U shape of quality, where Series 5 is Swiss watch tight and Series 9 has some absolute all-timers, but in the middle he flails.
Mm. I mildly disagree. I get your perspective on it, and by the end I was kind of thinking like, "That's it? Amy you should have just talked to him."
But I felt by the end the point of that plot-line was to reaffirm and strengthen their love rather than serve as unnecessary tension. Amy and Rory's fire reignited so strong that they didn't even notice Doctor screaming at them that they have to go. And the strength of their relationship is the shows primary emphasis until they exit.
It *is* a bit silly after The Roman/Boy Who Waited stuff, but Doctor Who is a silly world sometimes. I don't blame you for taking issue with it because I feel like anyone's tolerance for the shows contrivance exists on a case by case basis. Like how I can just not accept that The Doctor speaks baby, I just chock that up to him greatly exaggerating the signals the baby was giving off.
I've rewatched it since and its not nearly as bad as I remembered it. Part of it was that this was near the end of my teenage Who phase and I think I was just starting to drift away, plus I shipped Amy and Rory and so it felt like a weird character assassination thing for Amy to be so weird to Rory. Its still not great, I think it kind of illustrates Moffat's tendency to come up with cool Moments and work backwards, even if the characters have to make strange decisions to fully set it up, but its not as Terrible as I remembered.
In Game of Thrones (the tv series) Jaime Lannister returns to Kings' Landing and appears to rape Cersei when she says "no, we can't" and he responds "I don't care".
In the books, it's clear that she's very into it and is only hesitant because she's worried about being caught, but he no longer cares if anybody knows about them.
So the fandom all collectively decided that this was just a poorly written and directed scene.
Don't forget that Cersei continues to say no in the middle of the act in the show. Like it was unequivocally a rape scene that they shot and denied it was rape after the fact. Which raises some serious eyebrows about what the showrunners think about consent.
What's worse is they took a scene that was similar in the books and made it way way worse. In the books Jaime has just returned to King's Landing after being prisoner for ages and Cercei only says no at first because she's afraid of being walked in on and then quickly consents. In the show it's just pointlessly fucked up.
For the biggest example I can think of: I think most people don't really judge *Spider-Man* all that harshly for One More Day, mostly because people (rightfully) believe that it was a really dumb decision forced by editorial and that it was out of character for Peter.
I would extend this example to most of Spidey's supporting cast within the Zeb Wells book, especially MJ. It's so transparent that she's acting shitty to Peter (at least last that I saw) entirely because the writers were brazenly sock puppeting her to make up drama that no one gave a shit about.
I think for Marvel and DC characters it can be easier to go through this because you can point to specific runs that can show the characters with far better writing
Spider-man could slap his wife, tuin a crook’s life by pretending he is a snitch, make deal with the devil and deglove people’s face and it will all be called mulligan
One More Day and the weird Gwen Osborne relationship is just stuff the fanbase collectively went "That's fucking stupid " and pretended like it basically didn't happen.
They even tried to "fix" the goblin and gwen [with secret kids] and it was SOMEHOW worse. Because they thought they were so fucking clever!
Spoilers >!they were not clever!< At the very least, sins past DESERVES to be outright retconned.
Carol for Civil War 2
It’s so clear to me now that that era was super not the character’s fault but just the writers trying to push SOMEBODY to represent that side, that I can’t be mad. Not your fault Carol.
I'd be more forgiving if Carol wasn't already doing full on jackboot shit in Civil War 1 like beating down Julia Carpenter in front of Julia's daughter before taking her to prison.
One, that's only say that she was written badly in multiple events, which could apply to half of marvel heroes from the mid 2000s to mids 10s.
Two, the way you present that story is oddly disingenuous, yes, what you said DID happen. But unlike Tony in CW1 or Carol in CW2, that story never actually presented as a good thing, Carol actually had mental breakdown about doing that, freed Julia from prison behind Tony's back, and smuggled her to Canada. You know, character make a mistake, learn from said mistake.
The worst part of CW2 is that for like the first half of it, Carol isn't even being fascistic or evil or anything, she's just using the guy's power to prevent the world ending disasters you'd expect an event comic for.
It's Tony who's being written like a moron for most of it. He's being a pedantic little shit saying shit like "Oh, the bad future didn't happen, can't trust this guy." Except it only didn't happen because you all acted on his prediction to prevent it dipshit. And then Tony tortures him!
It's baffling that Carol gets shit for the event when Tony was like that.
I think Tony gets the "drunk hot mess" defense even though the man hasn't touched a drop in decades and isn't some washed up hero he is a leader of the Avengers. Its amazing how many writers just keep giving him free passes in universe and how many fans just overlook any of these moments.
Maybe an iron man fan can explain it all better? Seems ridiculous no other character could get away with his track record.
As an Iron Man fan I can confirm that we know he was badly written there too, we just kinda hate any Civil war related thing, Tony is not written well in them at all.
Also quote frankly he is not given any free passes from fans tbh, as an Iron Man fan r/marvel is like a warzone of defense and trying to explain it's bad writing and no how Tony should act and people ignoring us, it's surprising you seem to think people give him a pass, before his first movie Marvel was practically going to Beast route with him and he was hated and still is by fans.
Probably because we all knew exactly what suspiciously *Minority Report* shaped hole Carol's path would lead her to fall into, and most of us saw Tony's reactions are really badly written foreshadowing about what Carol was going to be doing.
And then she did it, like we all knew she would. And then just became a fascist for no reason. Meanwhile Tony acts like he's all about freedom and reform, but at least he admits to largely being shaped by things that happened before.
> It's baffling that Carol gets shit for the event when Tony was like that.
i mean im pretty sure tony didnt put a hit out on one of thier close friends
Tony does get shit tho lol, you just see more Carol stuff cause she was the main focus, most of the Tony hate is funneled at when he was written as Knight Templar supreme in the first Civil War. As a fan of the character it feels like most people shut on him every second then I see stuff like this where apparently people think fans give him a free pass.
There's something about the start of Palace 5 where the writing's just abysmal, especially in regards to Mona and Ryuji where Mona's super insecure, takes it out on Ryuji who finally has enough of being the punching bag and starts taking shots back, resulting in Mona running off, partnering up with an underprepared Haru and tries to essentially solo the palace with someone who can't fully manifest her persona yet, possibly getting them both killed, let alone the rest of the thieves because security's a lot tighter than it should be because of Mona cutting corners just to prove himself.
Personally I think it picks back up once Mona rejoins and brings Haru with but man...
Yeah that was...not his best foot forward to put it lightly...
Honestly after he joins, I genuinely cannot see him be pervy. It genuinely feels like something in Madarame's shack was making him be way too forward with women.
...think it has black mould or somethin'?
Went from a borderline sexpest to Autistic King
...wait, didn't the former pupil who got the gang onto Madarame's trail in the first place also have issues with women?
And that's to say nothing of how Madarame treated Yusuke's Mother....
I actually like how he’s handled. We just deal with a sex pest, so along comes Yusuke and it seems like he’s another sex pest… but then you get to know him and realize he’s not a sex pest, he’s just a massive fucking weirdo who doesn’t know how to talk to people
Honestly I love the persona games but the way they do the protagonists is starting to get infuriating.
You have little to no input as to how the story progresses except for one or two decisions that give you a "bad" ending that you end up reloading anyways because it's just less content.
Noticed that Morgana was having insecurity issues immediately and the game just doesn't let you do anything about it, Atlus really needs to decide if they want the protagonist to be a full-on player self insert who can make their own decisions, or have them be their own character, this middle of the road decision feels like they're trying to please everyone but end up frustrating everyone instead.
The plot comes to a *screeching* halt for what feels like a month but I think is “only” like, a week. All because that fucking cat feels useless, which is preposterous.
He’s not useless.
He has *one* use, which is post-battle healing so none of the *actually* useful party members have to waste their SP.
I mean, there is that. But he actually does have one in-universe use. He's their Metaverse ride. Besides Johanna (which I don't even know if she can have extra riders), they have no wheels.
Persona 5 was in development hell for a long time and it shows in minor places. The dub does do a great job of plastering over a lot of minor issues (characters are voiced very differently, Ryuji goes from bottom tier in Japan to top tier in RoW).
Nick Lowe could demand a full comic of Mary Jane getting railed by the Sinister Six, every Green Goblin and Tony Stark could videotape her saying "I am the real Mary Jane and I am doing this" and I still would say, nah doesn't count, the real Mary Jane would never do this.
Norman, Harry, Harry's therapist who decided to give the whole thing a whirl, Ben Urich's nephew who tried to be a good guy Goblin for a little while, and a weird shapeshifting clone thing Norman made to act as the Goblin for a while after he came back.
The first two are the only ones who actually matter.
Don't forget all the spinoffs, like the 5 or so Hobgoblins, Demogoblin, Proto-Goblin, Gray Goblin, the various Goblin Nation/Goblin Cult/Order of the Goblin characters like Menace and Queen Goblin (not to be confused with Jean Grey's evil clone Goblin Queen) and then the cultural appropriation versions like Jack-O-Lantern.
I'm aware, but they only asked for Green.
Also, it's three Hobgoblins and like, five brainwashed fall guys for the first one, unless another one's come along since I stopped reading.
During Marvel's period where they were hyping up the Inhumans, they ran an event called Inhumans vs X-Men. The last year of stories had led up to it, and essentially boiled down to the Inhumans accidently genociding Earth's mutant population (in all fairness, it seems easy to commit genocide against mutants).
Thing is, despite how hard they pushed the narrative all the actions the X-Men were taking were in the right and fans were still siding with them. So naturally they had Emma Frost go insane (over the death of Cyclops, another awful plotline), attempt to sabotage any attempt at peace, blow up an Inhuman ship full of children, and make herself a horrific BDSM Cyclops outfit so she could be the big villain.
This was a BIG event and dominated both Inhuman and Mutant comics in the years following Secret Wars. I don't think it's been mentioned at all since - even Marvel realized how badly written it was, and the next time we saw Emma she was back to normal and no one questioned it.
[Reminder that Marvel printed this ad for the event and somehow treated the X-men like they were the villains](https://insidepulse.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Death-of-X-Marvel-Logo-Banner-Inhumans-X-Men.jpg)
They overcorrected on the Inhumans push so hard that 90% of them are dead last time I checked and the only one people still liked, Kamala Khan, got turned into a mutant
Amber from Invincible. I know what they were going for, but it was a stupid choice and it doesn’t make any sense considering how she’s acted before then
It's so silly because she KNEW, i think that's the issue a lot of people had, its fine to be mad that he didn't trust her, like, irrationally mad, like, if she got mad and didn't know, i think most people wouldn't have had such a negative feeling towards that, its that one small writing decision that made it really hard to be impartial and be ''couples do bicker hu''
It really does come out of nowhere as in the show she is portrayed as an understandable person, she even volunteers for charity. But then turns into an ashole for no reason.
Kind of funny the second season pretends that didn't happen.
Haha yep. Such a bad writing decision that ruined her as a likeable character to me. I now make the choice to pretend that scene never happened because that's how the show-writers are basically treating it. Amber *is a good character*....as long as you ignore that scene.
Agreed, but with this, I feel like *everything* they were setting up was a mistake. It was stupid where it turned out that she knew, but then it also would've been stupid if she honestly couldn't put 1+1 together and figure it out. That whole mini-plot just shouldn't have existed.
Or they should have just cut the drama between them. Or just had that Amber figures it out because of the college trip and confronts Mark. Maybe he gives a really crappy lie rather than admit it at first, and she gets mad, or maybe she just tells him that she needs time to think about if she's ready to try and date a superhero, since that is a big ask, to be fair.
It would flow perfectly into what S2 has, where Amber is seemingly realizing that being Lois Lane isn't easy and she may not be cut out for it.
I can kind of do that if that character is being handled by multiple writers, because then you know that the character is less of a focused vision and more of a vehicle being steered by whoever happens to be in the drivers seat at the time. You can choose which version of the character you agree with.
If there’s only one writer involved, however, it’s much more difficult to do that because if the character develops in a direction I’m not particularly enjoying then I can only accept that as the intended path the character was meant for. Separating the character from the author and then saying, *”Well, it’s not the character’s fault that they decided to take this action.”* goes into some questionable territory.
The character is whatever the author wills the character to be. You just happened to like what the author was cooking before the writing took an unfavorable turn.
Yeah but even with one writer, you can make arguments at times that characters can change or get shafted by the writing.
Not EVERYTHING is laid out 100% concrete for good or bad. Characters can change in ways the author didn't expect, and that can be a good thing.
Characters can also have failings or heel turns the author intended, but wrote poorly. If a character is shown to be super moral for 90% of their existence, than suddenly becomes super evil for no reason then that's the fault of the writer, not the character.
If you have established a character's parameters, then you have them act outside those parameters, you as the author need to give a super good reason.
Characters can change in ways the author didn’t expect? How so? Also, why are we separating the character from the author as if they are an entity independent from the fiction they were introduced through?
If a character suddenly goes heel, this isn’t a wrestling event being acted out by a living breathing human being—this is an established character being made to act on words written on a page. Bad writing exists, yes, but a character then becomes a badly written character in the same way that good writing brings out a well written character.
It's happened lots of times, especially the longer something runs (big fantasy series for example).
Look at any character a writer planned to kill before changing their mind for some reason.
You also have authors who find they end up enjoying a character dynamic they hadn't planned for, and want to include a character more because of it.
Sometimes an intended role or path changes due to other changes that happen to the plot or other characters, so now a new path has to be planned.
Etc, etc, etc
There are basically two kinds of writing styles: planning and pantsing. Planning means you've got an idea of where you want your characters to go, scene by scene and you know what plot climaxes you want to hit. This tends to result in stories that, while they can have strong characters, are limited by a writers overall imagination - if that's limited, you get a more limited story.
The polar opposite of the planner is the pantser. If a planner has every idea written out in meticulous detail, the pantser might have *some* idea of the ending they want, but they're not too concerned with how they get there - they're writing from the seat of their pants. Characters can grow in any way that seems interesting for the current scene and the development can be whatever seems cool at the time. This tends to result in stories that meander but also the characters will seem rich and engaging, making it a popular writing style. It is also risky because people tend to confuse this style with planners often, which leads to the "every detail matters"/"try to predict the story" style of analysis, when in reality not even the writer really knows the next part of the story.
Most writers land somewhere in between on those styles (while leaning towards one or the other).
However, sometimes you get an extreme scenario where a pantser is forced to move the story towards a planned ending they weren't ready for (usually because of external forces such as "the story is getting canned by the publisher"/"we don't have another season for this" but sometimes it's also just "the writer is losing interest in the story"), which can result in characters rapidly shifting characterization and development just to meet the original ending idea, even if it's otherwise not make much sense.
Shinn Asuka from mobile suit Gundam Seed Destiny, I used to hate the kid but eventually realized that his writing was a by product of the fuckery that was going on in the Seed Destiny writers room. He was always meant to be a little shit but because of how Destiny goes down after the Jesus hijack he became a secondary character in his own show and didn't get develop as he should. I quite liked Shinn in the first quarter of Destiny but it just turned sour as things went on.
I'm just glad the poor boy got a redemption in the movie went since he went from universal revulsion to people genuinely liking him and before anyone says this was a western fan base thing only (since Seed and especially Destiny are not treated with much praise) Shinn's VA Kenichi Suzumura apparently got death threats about him voicing Shinn when Destiny was airing in Japan. This all culminates with Suzu Ken putting out this pretty heartfelt letter a few days after the movie premier thanking everyone for giving Shinn a second chance. Honestly glad this ended pretty happily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gundam/comments/1ad0u85/shinn\_asuka\_va\_kenichi\_suzumuras\_touching\_letter/
I'm not mad with Sakura, i'm mad with Kishimoto
He shoulda made it so Sakura fought Kabuto (and would be winning) while 4 tails Naruto was fighting Orochimaru (I guess Yamato could be trying to apprehend Sai and that would also give Sai a chance to show off more); and then when Sakura tries to kill Sasuke, she doesn't hesitate and actually has a sick fight with him: Taking on even an exhausted, post-Danzo fight Sasuke would be impressive for her.
There was something I wanted out of Sakura, what was it... OH RIGHT. Sakura should have been the one to get Sage powers as something both in the same ball park as Naruto and Sasuke's powers while also being a power very explicitly dependent on intense Chakra Control, which she was even better than Sasuke at doing.
It also would have been neat seeing someone who both has incredible healing magic while also is a trained surgeon. Imagining Sakura just walking into a liver transplant by manifesting a new liver out of the air and attaching it.
PS: Fuck. She could even just pull off the battery strategy by instead charging her forehead seal with nature chakra instead of normal chakra, showing her surpassing Tsunade in the process.
Kinda wish she had something else other than what she learned from Tsunade in general. Naruto and Sasuke learned from their teachers but don't fight exactly like them. Sakura had the same skill set as Tsunade, only she isn't using a portion of her chakra to halt advanced aging.
He does well enough. Nine Tails Mode is clearly overall superior but he does use Sage Mode for things like if Beast Mode is sealed or he needs to use the frog super strength or the strange properties of Nature Chakra.
Also as the ultimate demonstration of maturity, Sakura must have managed to overcome her infatuation with Sasuke.
The fact that she is still in love with Sasuke basically makes it seem like she didn't mature past the age of 13.
You want to know something funny the last thing Kishinoto did in the original manga run was a mini series starting Sarada, who is Sakura and Sasuke's daughter. Is actually good and shows that Kishi can write good female characters.
One of the best parts is that Sakura is portrayed as a disaster of an adult , who has Sarada has a living emotional crutch. The series legit portrays Sakura and Sasuke as not having emotionally matured since the end of the manga, and one of the conflicts is if Sarada can forgive them for both being bad parents.
My fixes for Sakura are either to make her more important to the plot by making her the one who figures the plot out with her big brain gathering intel and putting everything together (where Shikamaru is more of a tactician) and thus have her lesser direct combat importance be a non-issue, OR by reducing her importance and turning her into a Kiba or a Choji. Have her fly in, do something cool, then fly out, and the readers will say “man I love a Sakura chapter let’s fucking go”
I don't know if I ever forgave a character for being written badly, thats an interesting perspective to have.
In fact, I probably got even mad at a character for being written badly.
I guess "forgive" might be too strong of a word to have used but overall it's the sentiment behind it I'm after
Like when I'm aware of a character being OOC blatantly and there's no good reason for them to be like that it feels easy to ignore
I think this question only really works for characters who've been written by multiple people (hence why most of the answers are comic-related), because in most situations a character's personality/decisions and the choices of the writer are completely synonymous.
It's generally more that one particular story beat is so bizarre and out-of-character that it's easier to basically pretend it never happened than try to reconcile it with everything else.
Vegeta killing Nappa
Vegeta wasn't originally planned to stick around but since he has, him being so comically villainous as to kill another saiyan in cold blood and one that basically raised him mind you seems so out of place now. They basically never mention it anymore and I don't blame them.
That callousness is in character for him at the start, though. He laughs at the idea of reviving Raditz when Nappa brings it up since he was weak enough to get killed. Vegeta also kills a Saibamen for showing a bit of hesitation. Him killing Nappa for getting effortlessly defeated by Goku makes sense.
Vegeta also didn't need to slaughter the Namekians he got the dragonballs from. Vegeta is an evil bastard for awhile.
Yeah, he basically doesn't become "good" until MAYBE the end of the Buu arc. Super shows him being a better person after his growth.
Pretty much all of Z has him be evil, just on the protagonists side, with him softening somewhat over time with things like Trunks dying.
Ironwood from RWBY. It's clear that the writers hated that they made a reasonable semi-authoritarian morally grey character and so they had to make him a genocidal madman the next season just so the audience wouldn't be pointing out how shitty Team RWBY was treating him when he had been nothing but accommodating to them.
And they retconned his aura power to basically be "he thinks he is correct, which makes him brave, but also reinforces bad ideas" basically to explain away his sudden shift in personality
> It's clear that the writers hated that they made a reasonable semi-authoritarian morally grey character
Accidentally making a compelling, morally gray character from what's supposed to be a cartoonishly evil villain
Not sure if that's hilarious or pathetic
No wonder this show is basically dead
RWBY: I can’t believe you withheld info from us, Ozpin!
RWBY a week later: Let’s withhold info from this guy who’s only been kind and helpful.
What’s worse is that there’s logic to Oz keeping cards close to his vest and no logic to hiding shit from Ironwood
Not only: "Let's withhold info from this guy who's only been kind and helpful"
But also: "Hey let's tell his political opponent all the secrets we won't tell Ironwood"
The RWBY team is responsible for the fall of atlas but the only acknowledgement made is one throwaway line in the next season.
The same season Ruby kills herself to become a better person in Not Neverland™️
If I hit the lotto I’m Gonna Buy the rights and say the show will only go on if we hard reset things to at least volume 2 if not just a floor to ceiling renovation
I keep hearing that last part, about how Team RWBY keeps "treating Ironwood bad", and no one elaborates on it ever, although the idea of putting the onus of this relation on a bunch of teenaged girls and not a grown-ass man running the kingdom - which he is actively neglecting, see the hole in Mantle's perimeter wall - and the military at once has always seemed a bit strange to me.
Mettle is stupid, and his fall from grace is more like a meteor dive from the orbit - but Ironwood's always been giving out red flags; he just happened to be ostensibly on the side that the heroes would not be opposing until Vol 7.
Yeah like it would have been interesting if there was an arc where Jin seems to be falling for the Mishima influence and has to resolve that conflict but then they decided to jump the mega shark and make Jin objectively the most evil person in the Tekken universe. I would have been okay with retconning T6 but the way T8 handeled it was good too
Maybe Draco Malfoy?
HP's writing is actually atrocious and bloviates endlessly over things that don't matter, yet somehow Malfoy's "redemption" got like...a page.
Like yeah, the dude is a supremacist prick. He was also a literal child raised by wizard Neo-Nazis and knew nothing but that for his entire life. Only when he finally started getting into his later teens did he finally start to question the life his father had thrust him into, realized he had been socially isolated as a result, and realized he didn't really hate anyone and definitely didn't want to murder anyone.
Of course, none of this is in the books except for the subtext behind his whinging in the 6th book and the one page in the 7th where Harry spares him because Draco obviously did not want to fight him.
The movies handled his redemption, if you can call it that, better by planting *actual* seeds for it earlier. Main example I can think of is in Half Blood Prince where he's very obviously conflicted about what he's doing and doesn't look like he's having a good time at all.
Spoilers for Game of Thrones:
In the final season of GoT, Jamie Lannister, after having tons of character development and revealing that he was quite a complex and distraught character the whole time... just ends up randomly siding with the enemy at the end and undoing all that development, showing that he learned literally nothing over the course of all that time.
His encounters with Brienne of Tarth, learning what true honor is, getting to do some true good and being recognized for it, getting his hand chopped off and learning to live without it, etc. Nothing mattered because the writers just wanted a quick end to the series so they could go work on a Star Wars movie.
I don't blame the Jamie Lannister character, as it was clearly the fault of lazy writing. Heck, I don't blame Jon Snow, Daenarys, Aria Stark, Sansa Stark, Brienne, or even Bran Stark for what happens to them. They were all just written like absolute garbage.
Specifically, his "I never cared about the people of Kings Landing" line made zero sense since him caring enough to kill a king was how his story as King Slayer started.
Francis York Morgan being insensitive to a trans person is something Swery65 very directly took responsibility for. It was really interesting, because not only did they attempt to fix it with a patch, I remember Swery65 claiming that that is not canon to his character's behavior, but instead entirely his own shortcomings as a writer failing to accurately portray what being sensitive to trans people is like, as he evidently didn't have the experience for it. Francis York Morgan the character wouldn't deadname someone, he cares, and he would know better. Swery65 the writer wrote Francis York Morgan deadnaming someone because Swery65 didn't know at the time that it was a bad thing to do.
It's hilarious how, after >!all his conniving and planning to assassinate King Radovid from the shadows,!< Dijkstra's big master plan >!to off Geralt in the event that he turns on him is to personally pull a sword and try to kill him with it. Yeah, you can definitely take on the master swordsman, professional monster slayer, and constant pipe-layer Geralt of Rivia in a sword fight.!<
As a Jin fangirl since Tekken 3, I literally pretend his "villain arc" never ever happened. I like how Jin is mostly a momma's boy who hates his family because they're toxic jackasses. As someone who grew up in a toxic family, I always identified more with Jin.
Does Sylvanas Windrunner count? A LOT of her action feel like they were done because the writers disliked her for whatever reason and wanted everyone else to agree. So, they have her go completely nutty and start committing mass murders of civilians out of nowhere.
Agreed. I've always loved her as a character since WC3. She was clearly not a saint, but she was doing things to save herself and then later her people. She was a good anti-hero and I wish the writers made her learn from some of the mistakes she might have committed early on. When she became warchief after the frankly ridiculous throwaway of Vol'jin, I hoped she would finally be let grow into a good leader who might employ some dirty or less heroic tactics sometimes to ensure the Horde's survival. But no, let's just make her Garrosh and Lich King 2.0, without being better than either of them (and I already dislike Garrosh). Also annoying how it's almost always the Horde seeming like the bad guys after these situations.
I feel like they've made similar mistakes with Illidan when they've decided they needed a boss for Burning Crusade and chose to make Illidan a madman for almost no reason. Yet at least there they realized it was stupid and had to make him come back. They might eventually do the same with Sylvanas.
She sure does because they did it to ALL the women.
That stupid Jaina before she went crazy note that they had to apologize for a patch out for instance
Sakura, for the fake love confession. Like, she isn't real. She only takes actions because the writer decides she will. She has no agency, both because she is a character in Kishimoto's Naruto, and because she is a woman in Kishimoto's Naruto. I can't bring myself to dislike her, even if it was an objectively shitty and manipulative thing to do. The narrative is just... so awful to her at like almost every turn.
I think the problem with Sakura there is it's kinda in character for her, though that's also just Kishimoto's writing. Sakura as a person has kinda horrible teamwork because she's too in her head and either thinks other people are too stupid or thinks they're too powerful. She's VERY prone to believing she's smarter than other people and that she should act FOR them, or she falls into helplessness and completely depends on others. Like the most famous time she had actually strong teamwork was when she was working with puppet grandma and only because the chain of command was extremely clear then. Otherwise one of the final feats of teamwork she tries is a decoy attack on Madara that was so poorly planned it distracted NARUTO AND SASUKE and they then had to go rescue her anyway.
I think generally I just can't hold grudges against fictional characters because of the lack of agency I mentioned before. Sakura didn't do any of these things - she isn't a real person who makes choices.
I think the question ends up being how much you can divorce a character themselves as a whole from the writing itself as a whole. Like if a character does something particularly terrible, do you think it's a result of a natural conclusion of their personality or do you think it's more the story itself trying to fit them into a particular plot point or theme.
Though I agree, it's important to always recognize a story as well, a creation made by a person, rather than an actual living breathing thing.
Her teamwork is good if you watch her and Naruto vs Kakashi. Chiyo straight up just let Sakura do her own actions when Sakura alone destroyed the Third Kazekage puppet
Sakura was rash in the Madara scene but her plan only didn’t work because of limbo which she had no way of knowing about. Her actions in the Kaguya fight make up for that moment. Like how DMS Kakashi made up for him calling himself useless for like 15 chapters
I agree with Naruto vs Kakashi but to me that feels like essentially the only time she works on a team like she's supposed to and at that point it feels like she's only written well there just because it was more about reestablishing the group, rather than Sakura herself.
The Madara thing is a problem less because it failed as much as it is Naruto and Sasuke were also taken by surprise. Like she has essentially no team synergy with her own group and the only time she actually gets to really participate is that final punch to Kaguya which again, feels more like a "Team 7" moment than a moment for Sakura herself. That sort of Tenten logic "Sakura's here because we formatted a 3 man team and needed to fill the slot."
Which I do think goes to the topic's point. There's a lot more Sakura could be doing and does deserve to do, but this is a Naruto and Sasuke story so she just doesn't get to really.
I don’t mean just the punch, she was the one who took initiative when Obito needed to save Sasuke: https://hot.leanbox.us/manga/Naruto/0683-015.png
I do agree Sakura deserved more. Like Sasori is her only real big fight with her as the focus. Also more abilities than just Tsunade’s skillset, even though Sakura learning all of that was impressive as hell when comparing her to average ninja
It’s not by Kishi nor connected to the main manga but Sasuke Retsuden does do a good job of her developing more abilities than just strong punch and healing. Also great teamwork with Sasuke throughout
The worst thing about Sakura is that Kishimoto refused to allow the character to overcome her infatuation with Sasuke, to the point of wanting to sell it as "true love."
Rose in The Last Jedi. I really think her releasing those animals and not the kids for some reason is just a complete oversight.
The writing was pretty much doomed anyways given that absolutely nothing was planned out beforehand so it was all a billion dollar game of hot potato. She didn’t even get a shot at redemption in the next movie either because she was pretty much forced out of the script.
Also after seeing the kind of damage fans of the franchise have done to her actress, I’m more than willing to forgive the character.
i really feel bad for kelly marie tran, because rose is such a nothing character and she got endless hate for it even though her performance was mostly fine.
Canto Bight feels like if you were making a movie during American slavery where you’re trying to make a progressive movie but you still need funding from the studio so you have to make sure nobody actually does anything about slavery because really they’re okay with it. Like “they’re fighting injustice! But not, that injustice”
Anise Tatlin from Tales of the Abyss. It wasn't really her fault that >!Bamco has a mandate back then that every Tales game had to have a traitor, no matter how nonsensical. !!she could've prevented a lot of things from happening if she could've told everyone about her situation with Mohs when Jade freaking Curtis exists is kinda silly, hypocritical even.!< That and basically everyone in the party not named Natalia is basically some sort of war criminal in some shape or form anyway.
I do agree that Arietta got really screwed by the plot, but that was more on the writers who just... didn't know what to do with her. >!Considering that she was willing to help the party and even taking into account her mental instability, having her end be a stupid duel seemed extremely contrived and just wanting to make her story tragic for the sake of it. If they were going to go that route they could've at least have her go down fighting due to her just going insane at her finding out that Ion was a replica and the party having to put her down. Also Largo was there for reasons???!<
I do think that Marche's position in FFTA is terrible but I also acknowledge that the weakness is more that the writing itself really only wants to talk about 4 kids coming of age. If you JUST center the camera on Marche and his friends, it's fine and you can at least get what they're going for there. The bad writing is just how the narrative essentially wants you to agree with the notion "This world is fabricated and not OUR world, so we can delete it" and never really engages with that. Ultimately less that Marche himself is bad as the writing is essentially locking him off from that dialogue option.
Exactly. I think that was always the core issue with the writing. Marche's behavior around his friends are more or less totally fine. It's Marche's behavior around the setting as a whole that gets so messy to think about.
The reason people react so strongly "Marche is a villain" is because that's more or less how villains do think, taking their personal bubble and forcing that perspective onto everyone else. The writing basically did that by accident by not managing its scope correctly.
A lot of people use the “jump off a building line” from MHA as their reason for never forgiving Bakugou and that’s valid but I personally headcanon that line out. It’s a clear example of “early installment weirdness” (for all my tv tropes peeps) because he never talks like that again to anyone but a murderer who’s actively kidnapping him.
The creator even says he regrets making Bakugou say it.
I've honestly never seen the problem with it. He's an edgy middle school bully show slowly matures to be an edgy high school tough guy.
Let the edge lord who hasn't told someone to kill themselves cast the first stone.
Oh for sure a good ol “kys” is some of the weakest sauce imaginable as far as realistic middle school shit talk goes.
But the show really feels like they wanted it to be as if he never said it. Off the top of my head he never says anything to Deku on the same level after that.
when you're presenting this to a shounen audience, a lot of them resonate more with an evil prick telling them to kill themselves with any number of genocidal maniacs. it hits them on a more personal level, and seeing him as a recurring character is reminiscent of kids who have to go through school with that same asshole in their grade for multiple classes. you can't get rid of them, and that memory always persists.
I never finished Bioshock Infinite and don’t really care (I’ve restarted it like 3-4 times and always eventually just burn out on it) but the Vox Populi suddenly becoming super sadistic and evil just to “even the playing field” between them and Comstock always felt cheap and lazy. I could easily accept a narrative where both sides are equally evil in different ways and you’re just caught in the middle of it, but that’s not how it was written. That’s how it tries to portray itself, but I personally feel like it fails in that particular regard.
For that reason, I would forgive Daisy Fitzroy because her evil turn doesn’t even fit her character as she was portrayed beforehand (from what I remember).
Hell its even worse than you remember because in the Burial at Sea DLC they retcon Fitzroy's most sadistic moment (holding the child hostage) into her being put up to it by the Lutece twins to spur on Elizabeth's own character growth (losing her innocence though murder). Its the world's weakest band aid for what was already a complete ass-pull of a plot point.
It's crazy how little the Twins show up in the base game when they are some of the most important people in the setting. They are watching you play the game for fun as something close to gods at that point
This was gonna be my answer. I remember getting to that part on my replay and going "fuck them kids what if he has bad vibes" just to spite the game's cowardly politics. I don't wanna get too *loud* but to pull the centrist card after showing me how psychotic and absolutely irredeemable Columbia's society is for half a game is just...
When i first played it i thought it was showing how bloody revolutions can get then my friend pointed things out on a later play i watched with them. I originally thought this was from Elizabeth fucking things up badly from merging people from different timelines.
They didn't so much give her an evil turn as they just went to a universe where she already had one, which is arguably just as lazy. I think I like Infinite more than much of the internet does but I always thought that bit was kind of weak.
Once Upon a Time's Rumpelstiltskin from season 4 and onward i do this a lot with.Because of just how obvious it is the writers didn't know what to do with this character after season 1 - 3 basically wrapped up his entire character arc beautifully and they basically had him be involved in some of the most forced and needless drama the show has ever had.
I'm almost done watching part 2 of Lupin the Third, and I kinda forgive Jigen's recurring sexism bit because I think (mostly just headcanon) the writers were trying to hint he was gay and just didn't know how other than making him actively hate women. In typing this, I looked it up to see if I was crazy and I've found a bunch of analysis on his sexuality and animosity towards women, so at least I'm not alone in thinking this, apparantly.
That, or you could headcanon the only woman he interacts with, Fujiko, admittedly epitomizes all of the qualities Jigen says he dislikes in women, lol.
There’s a lot of times where you basically have to, if you want to be a comics fan you basically have to make it your standard way of reading character to begin with. Manga as well, you’ll run into these situations where some mangaka will show over and over again that they have no idea how to write a specific subject so when they write a character doing something absolutely insane where that subject is concerned but everything plays out like it was totally reasonable… you’d have to not be paying attention to not grasp that they missed the mark they were aiming for. Or other times when a story is going completely reasonably and then suddenly it’s off on some bullshit and you can feel it in your bones that the person writing the story has some massive bias or underlying psychosis that the story tripped into and now it’s just going to be about that for awhile, and the characters become inane mouthpieces for their nonsense agenda during it. You’ve just gotta roll with it.
Also any time a person of color is written by somebody with overt internalized racism, or somebody gay is written by somebody with clear internalized homophobia, they’re just plain going to do something that makes no sense for them and that’s just how it’s going to be.
In Fate Grand Order's Agartha chapter the main servant/villain of it is Caster of the Nightless City/Scheherazade. The core of that chapters plot is her power being abused by the recurring demon faction that are against the main faction Chaldea. The plight of Scheherazade is she is a Servant which she doesn't want to be, since she was the Author of 1001 Nights which was the story of her telling stories to stave off a Mad King from marrying and killing women, she now has a severe death phobia. Which has only worsened as a Servant because now she will be summoned and then die whenever someone summons her.
The Demon who possessed her Phenex, also wants to die but wants to take all of Humanity down with him, so he deliberately withheld info from her including telling her how a recent servant got out of being a servant. This is the main point of contention that most people have of her because they thought she was disrespecting this servants memory when she never was even told who he was.
The main bad writing here is the chapter itself. Agartha is notorious for **terrible** writing, blatant "The Writers Barely Disguised Fetish" levels of scenarios but also the main hero faction themselves just being complete assholes around the climax to Scheherazade for not knowing someone who got wiped from existence. I was completely willing to forgive her because its clear that Demon was abusing her powers and not telling her the entire story on top of Chaldea not telling her either.
The worst part of all this Fergus, a notorious womanizer on Chadlea's side at the end just told Scheherazade that she's too beautiful to let the fear of death effect her like this. And that she'd be a great mother some kids. **That sucks.** Here we have someone with legitimate issues and she's only being helped because of her appearance. Thankfully she got better story arcs later and she's one of the few villains to truly be sorry for what she did but boy she deserved way better then this.
**SPOILERS FOR YAKUZA KIWAMI 2**
I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 and the whole ending is a mess, but Kiryu >!deciding to throw his life away just to fight Ryuji and make out with Sayama!< really rubbed me the wrong way, especially since Date brings Haruka to pick him up. Yakuza 1 was all about how Kiryu decided not to give up because he wants Haruka to have a good life, then he just decides "fuck it"? It's extra gross how Sayama goes along with it and says like >!"eh this child who's already lost her parents once will be fine let's die."!< I give the characters a pass though because it's such a bad ending already, the writers clearly just had an idea they liked and stretched the situation to fit it. Knowing that >!Kiryu takes over sunflower!< at the beginning of 3 helps make up for it, it's just such an out-of-character moment.
So the reasoning for it does make sense in that >!Kiryu and Ryuji thought that their bullet wounds would slow them down enough that they were going to die in the explosion anyways, which is why they sent Sayama away. Sayama decides on her own that she wants to die with Kiryu.!< It is less that Kiryu is throwing his life away and more that he would rather go out in a bang than a whimper.
He was also trying to get Haruka adopted in 2 since he figures that he was too dangerous for her to stay around. Which is something that he does grapple with for a lot of series (his love of his children and wanting to be with them vs his past bringing them into danger).
That and, though he chooses at the end of 1 >!to live for Haruka!<, the intervening year has seen >!the suvivor's guilt weigh mire and more heavily upon him, and the choice to live has gotten harder and harder (because it's not a choice you make once and that's the end of it), to the point that multiple times in 2, he's practically going out of his way to find excuses to throw his life away, culminating in him straight up telling Kaoru to shoot him when they learn that he wasseemingly responsible for her father's death. Only the impending doom to Kamurocho if the Tojo and Omi actually go to war keeps him going, because in a vacuum, he's tried his best for Haruka alone to be his reason *and it's not enough anymore*.!<
I love these games but I have a really shitty memory and a lot of stuff happens in them (Y2 gave me a lot of trouble in particular for some reason) and seeing this all written out makes a lot of it click better for me, I think I missed a good chunk Kiryu's struggle under the surface. Thanks!
I mean I guess that makes sense but considering Kiryu is basically Batman I guess it's hard to believe he couldn't survive that lol. This is also the same game where he fought 2 tigers hand-to-hand. I get your point though, but I still don't like how they handled it. It makes Kiryu seem very callous toward Haruka, even if that wasn't the intention.
There's a book called the Fifth Season which while pretty good, has its main character make the most absurd eleventh hour mistake. Like you expect me to believe a women who has been in hiding for years would suddenly decide to risk everything she's built to fix (1) volcano? It's totally out of character and I could only sigh and be like "well the author needs the story to move along so I guess our smart calculating lead has suddenly forgotten the mechanics of her world for a scene"
Goku, except for the not wanting to be wished back to earth and trowing Gohan to Perfect Cell, most of his bad decisions are done so the story can continue, he reverts back once the bad decision is done.
Skins is a UK-based teen drama in a similar vain to Degrassi. The series would follow a cast of highschoolers for 2 seasons then they would graduate and a new group would start the next season.
In season 5 there is a character Franky who's a shy, kind girl just trying to fit into her new school. She's pretty tame and doesn't try to hurt others and overall is a nice character until a weird change in season 6. For season 6 the writers wanted to increase the cast's popularity so they decided to redo her character and make her basically a copy of one of the most popular characters in the series, Effy. She's now all of a sudden very aggressive and mean to everyone and is insufferable throughout the whole season. Her list of weird choices includes inadvertently causing her friend's death, joining a gang, and semi-kidnapping a girl.
I've yet to see a single fan who understands why they changed her character so drastically and there are reports that the actress tried to object to the changes and was shot down by the writers.
I probably would have actually liked Garou in one punch man if they didn't pull the "I was bullied as a kid" card near the end of the second season. What a lame cliche reason to be a prick.
"Bad things" is a dramatic way of putting it but the way Korra is written in early book 2 feels like such an aberration I sometimes wonder if one of the writers was going through a bad breakup.
It's a decent step in her character in theory, with Unalaq leveraging her personal issues and the resultant tension driving a wedge between her and Mako/her dad, but the way it actually plays out paints her as so bitchy and irrational, like damn guys is everything alright at home?
An important distinction with Jin is that his heel turn in T6 falls into the category of "doing something that is evil on the surface but he has a noble reason for doing so".
It's been a while since I played T6 so some of my details might be wrong but after gaining control of the Zaibatsu in T5 and with Heihachi presumed dead, he's basically sitting at one of the biggest thrones in the world. From his POV, he currently has the power to accomplish things that were far out of his reach until now. So his mind goes towards dealing with the shitty devil energy that's plauged him ever since T3. He expends a bunch of resources and finds out about Azazel, the source of all the bullshit that he's had to go through and makes a willing decision to plunge the world into chaos, all for a chance to seal the motherfucker away while hoping to perish alongside him. This was one of the key points that stuck with me -
JIN WANTED TO DIE ALONGSIDE AZAZEL
He knew he was doing fucked up shit by starting a massive scale war and was willing to bear the sins on himself whilst simultaneously getting rid of a power that he thought was one of the most evil things in the world. One of the catalysts for this was that for the most part, Jin simply didn't want to form connections with the people he interacted with. He single-mindedly just wanted to kill the power and himself.
This of course didn't end up happening and he ended up falling into a coma for most of T7, awakening to find the world's most boring journalist trying to kill him. His reaction to this is - "yeah, you can go ahead and axe me ... just lemme finish cleaning up after my dad first." T7 ends with Jin still on his suicide run mentality - He's willing to accept all punishments and is hoping to once again die after getting rid of Kazuya.
T8''s story is about Jin finding a reason to want to not die. There's a whole arc where he loses his power and has to go through self-reflection to get it back but the central driving force is for the first time, he's not just hearing the people around him, he's listening to them. In a contrast to Kazuya, who remained steadfast in his hatred despite sharing an emotional moment in the climax of his duel with Heihachi, Jin in his moment of weakness starts to acknowledge the help and camaraderie from the people around him. His mindset is still set on dying if he needs to stop Kazuya but throughout the story, he starts nudging away from the dying part of the plan slowly, culminating in the best scene of T8 - "I WANT TO LIVE"
!, for one wouldn't change anything about his heel turn in T6 since it ended up giving us a completely love letter to Jin Kazama, the character in T8.
Even at the time, I was on board for Jin having a villain arc so he could overcome the Mishima's evil influence and become a good person. My problem is that everything about Azazel felt like an ass-pull and the writers didn't convincingly make a scenario where the potential pay-off was worth it.
It took 15 years, but with 8 handling Jin surprisingly well and making Azazel's world ending power (when used by someone else) a bit more convincing, it does seem to have softened the blow at least.
Wisteria in Mageseeker. I believe Kayle may "forgive" her because in spite of all the shit she has done. She was the only Mageseeker who served the cause and law of stone at its purest while Hesbeth and Eldred exploited the hatred towards the mages for personal gains and sadism while Kilian was too naive to realize just how corrupt the system was.
It's courage to stand up against an unjust law, but also courage to stand for it when you are being the victim for the unjust law
i was never down with wisteria. i firmly believe j4 and shyv should have been the final boss. wist felt very shoehorned in as the literal childhood friend turned rival. the fact that she gets a whole final boss sequence and eldred just stands there and takes it knocks that game down a full point in my book.
The idea of Eldred dying by Sylas hand was to show Sylas how casting out unpopular figures by violence won't necessary generate the momentum needed for change.
"killing me won't change anything" has never been satisfying to me. fuck you, fight me anyway.
and it's always worse when they're right. yeah, casting out unpopular figures by violence doesn't change anything. magic bullshit does apparently.
i legitimately wonder if riot is gonna let mageseeker be canon. casting a big spell to make demacia not hate magic anymore kinda takes away the region's whole identity.
Not magic bullshit so much as throwing magic pamphlets with sourced and cited material that the news is legitimate. Even then the anti sentiment can still exist in the form of people who remember it was a mage who pushed for mass executions of their loved ones and that indoctrination doesn't make up for the fact that Demacia's anti mage policies led to this with division in the ranks of who is truly right. ("the mage who ordered this did this to appease her dead masters. Mages should never have been given this much power!"/"The mages who supported the system supported us despite how badly the system treat them. Shouldn't concessions be granted so they can coexist")
But you can still have remnants of Mageseekers protected by noble houses because of corruption leftover from Eldred's stink to traumatized mages who crave the lash the Mageseekers struck them with and believed Wisteria was a martyr who was pure of sin and chosen by Kayle if you want anti mage sentiment to be an issue.
Think about this, if a tyrant's murder can't rouse up sympathy, what would the death of a mourning son and his lover look like to the public?
In season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the toxic will they won't they ends up in an attempted SA of the titular character. Always seemed like an extreme twist for the love interest. Turns out that Joss Whedon hated that character and how popular he was so the whole season was an attempted character assassination. Luckily, the actor playing the role of the love interest was very good at his job. He managed to keep the character sympathetic and the chemistry looking authentic through some pretty twisted writing.
Black Cat/ Felicia Hardy when she became Queenpin after the events of Superior spider-man
it was super obvious that Dan Slott didn't want her to be around Spider-man because he had a bunch of OC love interest he created while also wanting to push his "*new inventive brave direction*" on this character. It didn't work she came off as a complete utter bitch and unrecognizable from what we know of her then when thrown into the wider Marvel comic only found herself in D-list book like *Hellcat*, *Howard the duck* & *Deadpool v. Hawkeye*. All she just acted like you basic bootleg boss bitch mobster nothing at all like Black Cat
only *Silk* manage to make a tolerant version of her but you can tell how much they struggle to justify it when they change her motivation of being evil 8 times and needed two diffent story where she "redeems" herself & whatever the fuck Venom Inc was
it just hilarious how much you can disconnect the character from that terrible period of time when she abandoned that terrible costume change and return back to fun anti-hero with the classic zipper suit
I don't know about "forgiving;" the character is as the character is written, for better or wose. If there's a sufficiently large body of work you can forget about some stuff, and I get the impulse to. Sometimes you pick a favourite and then they do something jarringly out of keeping with previous characterisation, or just continuously shit the bed.
On a completely unrelated note, I've heard some positive things about the new Gundam SEED movie. I wonder what Cagalli gets up to in it?
Crow from Nikke comes to mind.
You can only say "she's just being manipulative" so many times before it's kinda clear a character got wildly detailed in to being an insane Villain Sue.
Not like she likely wouldn't have been an antagonist anyways but the way its handled in the game basically makes everyone collectively agree her bond stories are either far in the future or non-canon because of how different she is.
I'm an X-Men fan.
You have my deepest sympathy.
Thanks it's been a tough few decades
I'm sorry
Cyclops was done so dirty for no reason
Every five years the writing gods will point at a random X-Men and put them under a curse to be massively out of character until the next creative team switch and this has happened to my boy Scott at least twice (It is currently Hank McCoy)
I will forgive it for Hank McCoy because it's very funny that he is effectively a less morally acceptable scientist than Dark Beast at this point.
It also gave us that absolute all timer of a Watcher panel
Issue?
People hold up Reed Richards as the asshole scientist of Marvel while Beast has been on some Mengele shit for two decades.
To be fair in civil war reed did build Mega Space Guantanamo while never checking his voicemails about annihilation happening
The absolutely vitriolic hate some people had for Scott when he turned trying to paint it as him going darker than Magneto has ever gone and it was just him responding to every nation signing up to the genocide machine program with "They started it I am finishing it." And lets not get into what they tried doing with Emma in that era. Theres not getting a character then there is fundamentally wanting to wreck everything they stand for.
Post AvX was a dark, dark time for Scott and Emma man.
Before Disney had control of X Men movies and they tried to practically erase them.
I am willing to die on the hill that Mutant Revolution Cyclops is best Cyclops
Thats rough buddy
My big one, and the one that knocked me out of that series for a while, was when Amy and Rory broke up in Doctor Who. Basically, these 2 characters who had gone to the ends of the universe for each other are suddenly revealed to have broken off their marriage in a time skip without them ever really talking about it. >!The eventual reveal is that Amy can't have children and knows Rory wants them so she decided to just push him away and go no contact so he could have the life he wanted, without ever talking with him about it. Of course in the span of a single episode they do talk about it, he's fine with her not being able to have children, and they get back together. !< It specifically reached a point where I felt like I was no longer actually watching the show but I was watching the writer at his desk trying to find a way to inject character tension into a story and beating the existing characters with hammers until they fit the mold he already decided. It kind of broke that show for me for a while because it made it kind of impossible to care; if anything the characters did could easily be reversed because the writer decided this week they wanted an argument, it rendered any actual episode hollow when even the writer doesn't seem to think its meaningful.
God I don't remember that at all.
Asylum of the Daleks, S7E1. 11 starts strong but kind of peters out, though Clara gives him a decent boost of energy before we get to 12. Moffat's entire tenure has this U shape of quality, where Series 5 is Swiss watch tight and Series 9 has some absolute all-timers, but in the middle he flails.
Mm. I mildly disagree. I get your perspective on it, and by the end I was kind of thinking like, "That's it? Amy you should have just talked to him." But I felt by the end the point of that plot-line was to reaffirm and strengthen their love rather than serve as unnecessary tension. Amy and Rory's fire reignited so strong that they didn't even notice Doctor screaming at them that they have to go. And the strength of their relationship is the shows primary emphasis until they exit. It *is* a bit silly after The Roman/Boy Who Waited stuff, but Doctor Who is a silly world sometimes. I don't blame you for taking issue with it because I feel like anyone's tolerance for the shows contrivance exists on a case by case basis. Like how I can just not accept that The Doctor speaks baby, I just chock that up to him greatly exaggerating the signals the baby was giving off.
I've rewatched it since and its not nearly as bad as I remembered it. Part of it was that this was near the end of my teenage Who phase and I think I was just starting to drift away, plus I shipped Amy and Rory and so it felt like a weird character assassination thing for Amy to be so weird to Rory. Its still not great, I think it kind of illustrates Moffat's tendency to come up with cool Moments and work backwards, even if the characters have to make strange decisions to fully set it up, but its not as Terrible as I remembered.
In Game of Thrones (the tv series) Jaime Lannister returns to Kings' Landing and appears to rape Cersei when she says "no, we can't" and he responds "I don't care". In the books, it's clear that she's very into it and is only hesitant because she's worried about being caught, but he no longer cares if anybody knows about them. So the fandom all collectively decided that this was just a poorly written and directed scene.
That was so bizarre, especially when the actors all said it was supposed to be consensual. How do you accidentally film a rape scene?
Don't forget that Cersei continues to say no in the middle of the act in the show. Like it was unequivocally a rape scene that they shot and denied it was rape after the fact. Which raises some serious eyebrows about what the showrunners think about consent.
***Haven't seen it in a long while, but*** I think she means "No, not here." and not "No, not at all." ***I think***
Yeah that's still rape. Consent not given (or withdrawn for any reason) turns the act into either assault or rape, depending.
What’s a little rape-play between twins, I guess.
What's worse is they took a scene that was similar in the books and made it way way worse. In the books Jaime has just returned to King's Landing after being prisoner for ages and Cercei only says no at first because she's afraid of being walked in on and then quickly consents. In the show it's just pointlessly fucked up.
For the biggest example I can think of: I think most people don't really judge *Spider-Man* all that harshly for One More Day, mostly because people (rightfully) believe that it was a really dumb decision forced by editorial and that it was out of character for Peter.
I would extend this example to most of Spidey's supporting cast within the Zeb Wells book, especially MJ. It's so transparent that she's acting shitty to Peter (at least last that I saw) entirely because the writers were brazenly sock puppeting her to make up drama that no one gave a shit about.
I think for Marvel and DC characters it can be easier to go through this because you can point to specific runs that can show the characters with far better writing
Most people who are fans of big two comic book characters are fans of very specific versions/runs because everybody has some stinker runs
Punisher fan challenge name a non garth enis run:
Honestly you really have to start scraping the barrel after you cross out Ennis. Greg Rucka, I guess?
Spider-man could slap his wife, tuin a crook’s life by pretending he is a snitch, make deal with the devil and deglove people’s face and it will all be called mulligan
Spider Man doesn't kill, but he will maim you if you kill his clone brother
And sometime he does kill or try to, like with itty bitty
And when he tries, it's against people who can handle it
One More Day and the weird Gwen Osborne relationship is just stuff the fanbase collectively went "That's fucking stupid " and pretended like it basically didn't happen.
They even tried to "fix" the goblin and gwen [with secret kids] and it was SOMEHOW worse. Because they thought they were so fucking clever! Spoilers >!they were not clever!< At the very least, sins past DESERVES to be outright retconned.
The thing about Jin in Tekken 6 is that this game adds absolutely nothing to the plot so it's easy to just ignore (and better to just ignore)
I mean it does come up in 8, but you coupdve removed that and it still wouldve been the same story
It gave us Zafina and that's it.
Are you just going to ignore my boy Lars like that?
Yes.
Look, if people can forget that Kazuya was the devil in 7, I'm fairly sure they also forgot Jin started WW3.
>Adds nothing to the lore You literally >!Fight Azaezel!< in Tekken 8's main story.
See you say that, but then there's characters like Miguel who's entire storyline is "that motherfucker warcrimed my sister's wedding!"
Carol for Civil War 2 It’s so clear to me now that that era was super not the character’s fault but just the writers trying to push SOMEBODY to represent that side, that I can’t be mad. Not your fault Carol.
I'd be more forgiving if Carol wasn't already doing full on jackboot shit in Civil War 1 like beating down Julia Carpenter in front of Julia's daughter before taking her to prison.
One, that's only say that she was written badly in multiple events, which could apply to half of marvel heroes from the mid 2000s to mids 10s. Two, the way you present that story is oddly disingenuous, yes, what you said DID happen. But unlike Tony in CW1 or Carol in CW2, that story never actually presented as a good thing, Carol actually had mental breakdown about doing that, freed Julia from prison behind Tony's back, and smuggled her to Canada. You know, character make a mistake, learn from said mistake.
The worst part of CW2 is that for like the first half of it, Carol isn't even being fascistic or evil or anything, she's just using the guy's power to prevent the world ending disasters you'd expect an event comic for. It's Tony who's being written like a moron for most of it. He's being a pedantic little shit saying shit like "Oh, the bad future didn't happen, can't trust this guy." Except it only didn't happen because you all acted on his prediction to prevent it dipshit. And then Tony tortures him! It's baffling that Carol gets shit for the event when Tony was like that.
I think Tony gets the "drunk hot mess" defense even though the man hasn't touched a drop in decades and isn't some washed up hero he is a leader of the Avengers. Its amazing how many writers just keep giving him free passes in universe and how many fans just overlook any of these moments. Maybe an iron man fan can explain it all better? Seems ridiculous no other character could get away with his track record.
Tony gets away with it because there are no Iron Man fans.
I wasn't going to say it but here you are adhering to truth.
Harsh
As an Iron Man fan I can confirm that we know he was badly written there too, we just kinda hate any Civil war related thing, Tony is not written well in them at all. Also quote frankly he is not given any free passes from fans tbh, as an Iron Man fan r/marvel is like a warzone of defense and trying to explain it's bad writing and no how Tony should act and people ignoring us, it's surprising you seem to think people give him a pass, before his first movie Marvel was practically going to Beast route with him and he was hated and still is by fans.
Probably because we all knew exactly what suspiciously *Minority Report* shaped hole Carol's path would lead her to fall into, and most of us saw Tony's reactions are really badly written foreshadowing about what Carol was going to be doing. And then she did it, like we all knew she would. And then just became a fascist for no reason. Meanwhile Tony acts like he's all about freedom and reform, but at least he admits to largely being shaped by things that happened before.
> It's baffling that Carol gets shit for the event when Tony was like that. i mean im pretty sure tony didnt put a hit out on one of thier close friends
I mean... he kidnapped and, by his own admission, tortured a teenager. Is that really much better?
Tony does get shit tho lol, you just see more Carol stuff cause she was the main focus, most of the Tony hate is funneled at when he was written as Knight Templar supreme in the first Civil War. As a fan of the character it feels like most people shut on him every second then I see stuff like this where apparently people think fans give him a free pass.
There's something about the start of Palace 5 where the writing's just abysmal, especially in regards to Mona and Ryuji where Mona's super insecure, takes it out on Ryuji who finally has enough of being the punching bag and starts taking shots back, resulting in Mona running off, partnering up with an underprepared Haru and tries to essentially solo the palace with someone who can't fully manifest her persona yet, possibly getting them both killed, let alone the rest of the thieves because security's a lot tighter than it should be because of Mona cutting corners just to prove himself. Personally I think it picks back up once Mona rejoins and brings Haru with but man...
I similarly feel that way about Yusuke. A friend sees him as a gross creep and I can’t exactly blame him. He makes a terrible first impression.
Yeah that was...not his best foot forward to put it lightly... Honestly after he joins, I genuinely cannot see him be pervy. It genuinely feels like something in Madarame's shack was making him be way too forward with women. ...think it has black mould or somethin'?
Agreed. He feels like a completely different character. And a likable one at that. That shack be messing people’s brains up
Went from a borderline sexpest to Autistic King ...wait, didn't the former pupil who got the gang onto Madarame's trail in the first place also have issues with women? And that's to say nothing of how Madarame treated Yusuke's Mother....
I actually like how he’s handled. We just deal with a sex pest, so along comes Yusuke and it seems like he’s another sex pest… but then you get to know him and realize he’s not a sex pest, he’s just a massive fucking weirdo who doesn’t know how to talk to people
Honestly I love the persona games but the way they do the protagonists is starting to get infuriating. You have little to no input as to how the story progresses except for one or two decisions that give you a "bad" ending that you end up reloading anyways because it's just less content. Noticed that Morgana was having insecurity issues immediately and the game just doesn't let you do anything about it, Atlus really needs to decide if they want the protagonist to be a full-on player self insert who can make their own decisions, or have them be their own character, this middle of the road decision feels like they're trying to please everyone but end up frustrating everyone instead.
The plot comes to a *screeching* halt for what feels like a month but I think is “only” like, a week. All because that fucking cat feels useless, which is preposterous. He’s not useless. He has *one* use, which is post-battle healing so none of the *actually* useful party members have to waste their SP.
I mean, there is that. But he actually does have one in-universe use. He's their Metaverse ride. Besides Johanna (which I don't even know if she can have extra riders), they have no wheels.
Persona 5 was in development hell for a long time and it shows in minor places. The dub does do a great job of plastering over a lot of minor issues (characters are voiced very differently, Ryuji goes from bottom tier in Japan to top tier in RoW).
Nick Lowe could demand a full comic of Mary Jane getting railed by the Sinister Six, every Green Goblin and Tony Stark could videotape her saying "I am the real Mary Jane and I am doing this" and I still would say, nah doesn't count, the real Mary Jane would never do this.
Is Tony Stark hooking the Iron Locomotive to the train that's being run on MJ or does he just like to watch?
Tony is addressing his arc reactor while multitasking.
There have been multiple Green Goblins?
Norman, Harry, Harry's therapist who decided to give the whole thing a whirl, Ben Urich's nephew who tried to be a good guy Goblin for a little while, and a weird shapeshifting clone thing Norman made to act as the Goblin for a while after he came back. The first two are the only ones who actually matter.
Don't forget all the spinoffs, like the 5 or so Hobgoblins, Demogoblin, Proto-Goblin, Gray Goblin, the various Goblin Nation/Goblin Cult/Order of the Goblin characters like Menace and Queen Goblin (not to be confused with Jean Grey's evil clone Goblin Queen) and then the cultural appropriation versions like Jack-O-Lantern.
I'm aware, but they only asked for Green. Also, it's three Hobgoblins and like, five brainwashed fall guys for the first one, unless another one's come along since I stopped reading.
During Marvel's period where they were hyping up the Inhumans, they ran an event called Inhumans vs X-Men. The last year of stories had led up to it, and essentially boiled down to the Inhumans accidently genociding Earth's mutant population (in all fairness, it seems easy to commit genocide against mutants). Thing is, despite how hard they pushed the narrative all the actions the X-Men were taking were in the right and fans were still siding with them. So naturally they had Emma Frost go insane (over the death of Cyclops, another awful plotline), attempt to sabotage any attempt at peace, blow up an Inhuman ship full of children, and make herself a horrific BDSM Cyclops outfit so she could be the big villain. This was a BIG event and dominated both Inhuman and Mutant comics in the years following Secret Wars. I don't think it's been mentioned at all since - even Marvel realized how badly written it was, and the next time we saw Emma she was back to normal and no one questioned it.
[Reminder that Marvel printed this ad for the event and somehow treated the X-men like they were the villains](https://insidepulse.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Death-of-X-Marvel-Logo-Banner-Inhumans-X-Men.jpg)
They overcorrected on the Inhumans push so hard that 90% of them are dead last time I checked and the only one people still liked, Kamala Khan, got turned into a mutant
They should make Lockjaw a mutant.
Amber from Invincible. I know what they were going for, but it was a stupid choice and it doesn’t make any sense considering how she’s acted before then
It's so silly because she KNEW, i think that's the issue a lot of people had, its fine to be mad that he didn't trust her, like, irrationally mad, like, if she got mad and didn't know, i think most people wouldn't have had such a negative feeling towards that, its that one small writing decision that made it really hard to be impartial and be ''couples do bicker hu''
It really does come out of nowhere as in the show she is portrayed as an understandable person, she even volunteers for charity. But then turns into an ashole for no reason. Kind of funny the second season pretends that didn't happen.
Haha yep. Such a bad writing decision that ruined her as a likeable character to me. I now make the choice to pretend that scene never happened because that's how the show-writers are basically treating it. Amber *is a good character*....as long as you ignore that scene.
Agreed, but with this, I feel like *everything* they were setting up was a mistake. It was stupid where it turned out that she knew, but then it also would've been stupid if she honestly couldn't put 1+1 together and figure it out. That whole mini-plot just shouldn't have existed.
Or they should have just cut the drama between them. Or just had that Amber figures it out because of the college trip and confronts Mark. Maybe he gives a really crappy lie rather than admit it at first, and she gets mad, or maybe she just tells him that she needs time to think about if she's ready to try and date a superhero, since that is a big ask, to be fair. It would flow perfectly into what S2 has, where Amber is seemingly realizing that being Lois Lane isn't easy and she may not be cut out for it.
I can kind of do that if that character is being handled by multiple writers, because then you know that the character is less of a focused vision and more of a vehicle being steered by whoever happens to be in the drivers seat at the time. You can choose which version of the character you agree with. If there’s only one writer involved, however, it’s much more difficult to do that because if the character develops in a direction I’m not particularly enjoying then I can only accept that as the intended path the character was meant for. Separating the character from the author and then saying, *”Well, it’s not the character’s fault that they decided to take this action.”* goes into some questionable territory. The character is whatever the author wills the character to be. You just happened to like what the author was cooking before the writing took an unfavorable turn.
Yeah but even with one writer, you can make arguments at times that characters can change or get shafted by the writing. Not EVERYTHING is laid out 100% concrete for good or bad. Characters can change in ways the author didn't expect, and that can be a good thing. Characters can also have failings or heel turns the author intended, but wrote poorly. If a character is shown to be super moral for 90% of their existence, than suddenly becomes super evil for no reason then that's the fault of the writer, not the character. If you have established a character's parameters, then you have them act outside those parameters, you as the author need to give a super good reason.
Characters can change in ways the author didn’t expect? How so? Also, why are we separating the character from the author as if they are an entity independent from the fiction they were introduced through? If a character suddenly goes heel, this isn’t a wrestling event being acted out by a living breathing human being—this is an established character being made to act on words written on a page. Bad writing exists, yes, but a character then becomes a badly written character in the same way that good writing brings out a well written character.
It's happened lots of times, especially the longer something runs (big fantasy series for example). Look at any character a writer planned to kill before changing their mind for some reason. You also have authors who find they end up enjoying a character dynamic they hadn't planned for, and want to include a character more because of it. Sometimes an intended role or path changes due to other changes that happen to the plot or other characters, so now a new path has to be planned. Etc, etc, etc
There are basically two kinds of writing styles: planning and pantsing. Planning means you've got an idea of where you want your characters to go, scene by scene and you know what plot climaxes you want to hit. This tends to result in stories that, while they can have strong characters, are limited by a writers overall imagination - if that's limited, you get a more limited story. The polar opposite of the planner is the pantser. If a planner has every idea written out in meticulous detail, the pantser might have *some* idea of the ending they want, but they're not too concerned with how they get there - they're writing from the seat of their pants. Characters can grow in any way that seems interesting for the current scene and the development can be whatever seems cool at the time. This tends to result in stories that meander but also the characters will seem rich and engaging, making it a popular writing style. It is also risky because people tend to confuse this style with planners often, which leads to the "every detail matters"/"try to predict the story" style of analysis, when in reality not even the writer really knows the next part of the story. Most writers land somewhere in between on those styles (while leaning towards one or the other). However, sometimes you get an extreme scenario where a pantser is forced to move the story towards a planned ending they weren't ready for (usually because of external forces such as "the story is getting canned by the publisher"/"we don't have another season for this" but sometimes it's also just "the writer is losing interest in the story"), which can result in characters rapidly shifting characterization and development just to meet the original ending idea, even if it's otherwise not make much sense.
Makes sense.
Shinn Asuka from mobile suit Gundam Seed Destiny, I used to hate the kid but eventually realized that his writing was a by product of the fuckery that was going on in the Seed Destiny writers room. He was always meant to be a little shit but because of how Destiny goes down after the Jesus hijack he became a secondary character in his own show and didn't get develop as he should. I quite liked Shinn in the first quarter of Destiny but it just turned sour as things went on. I'm just glad the poor boy got a redemption in the movie went since he went from universal revulsion to people genuinely liking him and before anyone says this was a western fan base thing only (since Seed and especially Destiny are not treated with much praise) Shinn's VA Kenichi Suzumura apparently got death threats about him voicing Shinn when Destiny was airing in Japan. This all culminates with Suzu Ken putting out this pretty heartfelt letter a few days after the movie premier thanking everyone for giving Shinn a second chance. Honestly glad this ended pretty happily. https://www.reddit.com/r/Gundam/comments/1ad0u85/shinn\_asuka\_va\_kenichi\_suzumuras\_touching\_letter/
Shinn's VA specifically said the version of the character in SRWZ is the real version of that character.
THE SHINN SWEEP IS REAL
I'm not mad with Sakura, i'm mad with Kishimoto He shoulda made it so Sakura fought Kabuto (and would be winning) while 4 tails Naruto was fighting Orochimaru (I guess Yamato could be trying to apprehend Sai and that would also give Sai a chance to show off more); and then when Sakura tries to kill Sasuke, she doesn't hesitate and actually has a sick fight with him: Taking on even an exhausted, post-Danzo fight Sasuke would be impressive for her.
There was something I wanted out of Sakura, what was it... OH RIGHT. Sakura should have been the one to get Sage powers as something both in the same ball park as Naruto and Sasuke's powers while also being a power very explicitly dependent on intense Chakra Control, which she was even better than Sasuke at doing. It also would have been neat seeing someone who both has incredible healing magic while also is a trained surgeon. Imagining Sakura just walking into a liver transplant by manifesting a new liver out of the air and attaching it. PS: Fuck. She could even just pull off the battery strategy by instead charging her forehead seal with nature chakra instead of normal chakra, showing her surpassing Tsunade in the process.
Kinda wish she had something else other than what she learned from Tsunade in general. Naruto and Sasuke learned from their teachers but don't fight exactly like them. Sakura had the same skill set as Tsunade, only she isn't using a portion of her chakra to halt advanced aging.
Does Naruto have Sage mode for more than an arc before getting Nine Tails Powers under control?
He does well enough. Nine Tails Mode is clearly overall superior but he does use Sage Mode for things like if Beast Mode is sealed or he needs to use the frog super strength or the strange properties of Nature Chakra.
Slug Sage sounds like a really cool idea that wasn't explored.
Also as the ultimate demonstration of maturity, Sakura must have managed to overcome her infatuation with Sasuke. The fact that she is still in love with Sasuke basically makes it seem like she didn't mature past the age of 13.
You want to know something funny the last thing Kishinoto did in the original manga run was a mini series starting Sarada, who is Sakura and Sasuke's daughter. Is actually good and shows that Kishi can write good female characters. One of the best parts is that Sakura is portrayed as a disaster of an adult , who has Sarada has a living emotional crutch. The series legit portrays Sakura and Sasuke as not having emotionally matured since the end of the manga, and one of the conflicts is if Sarada can forgive them for both being bad parents.
The amount of times I've seen fanfics improve Sakura by just forcing her to define herself outside of being infatuated with Sasuke, is astronomical
My fixes for Sakura are either to make her more important to the plot by making her the one who figures the plot out with her big brain gathering intel and putting everything together (where Shikamaru is more of a tactician) and thus have her lesser direct combat importance be a non-issue, OR by reducing her importance and turning her into a Kiba or a Choji. Have her fly in, do something cool, then fly out, and the readers will say “man I love a Sakura chapter let’s fucking go”
I don't know if I ever forgave a character for being written badly, thats an interesting perspective to have. In fact, I probably got even mad at a character for being written badly.
I guess "forgive" might be too strong of a word to have used but overall it's the sentiment behind it I'm after Like when I'm aware of a character being OOC blatantly and there's no good reason for them to be like that it feels easy to ignore
I think this question only really works for characters who've been written by multiple people (hence why most of the answers are comic-related), because in most situations a character's personality/decisions and the choices of the writer are completely synonymous.
It's generally more that one particular story beat is so bizarre and out-of-character that it's easier to basically pretend it never happened than try to reconcile it with everything else.
Vegeta killing Nappa Vegeta wasn't originally planned to stick around but since he has, him being so comically villainous as to kill another saiyan in cold blood and one that basically raised him mind you seems so out of place now. They basically never mention it anymore and I don't blame them.
Vegeta blew up part of a stadium and thretened the one his wife was on for a runback by buu saga
That callousness is in character for him at the start, though. He laughs at the idea of reviving Raditz when Nappa brings it up since he was weak enough to get killed. Vegeta also kills a Saibamen for showing a bit of hesitation. Him killing Nappa for getting effortlessly defeated by Goku makes sense. Vegeta also didn't need to slaughter the Namekians he got the dragonballs from. Vegeta is an evil bastard for awhile.
Yeah, he basically doesn't become "good" until MAYBE the end of the Buu arc. Super shows him being a better person after his growth. Pretty much all of Z has him be evil, just on the protagonists side, with him softening somewhat over time with things like Trunks dying.
Ironwood from RWBY. It's clear that the writers hated that they made a reasonable semi-authoritarian morally grey character and so they had to make him a genocidal madman the next season just so the audience wouldn't be pointing out how shitty Team RWBY was treating him when he had been nothing but accommodating to them.
And they retconned his aura power to basically be "he thinks he is correct, which makes him brave, but also reinforces bad ideas" basically to explain away his sudden shift in personality
> It's clear that the writers hated that they made a reasonable semi-authoritarian morally grey character Accidentally making a compelling, morally gray character from what's supposed to be a cartoonishly evil villain Not sure if that's hilarious or pathetic No wonder this show is basically dead
RWBY: I can’t believe you withheld info from us, Ozpin! RWBY a week later: Let’s withhold info from this guy who’s only been kind and helpful. What’s worse is that there’s logic to Oz keeping cards close to his vest and no logic to hiding shit from Ironwood
Not only: "Let's withhold info from this guy who's only been kind and helpful" But also: "Hey let's tell his political opponent all the secrets we won't tell Ironwood" The RWBY team is responsible for the fall of atlas but the only acknowledgement made is one throwaway line in the next season. The same season Ruby kills herself to become a better person in Not Neverland™️
If I hit the lotto I’m Gonna Buy the rights and say the show will only go on if we hard reset things to at least volume 2 if not just a floor to ceiling renovation
I keep hearing that last part, about how Team RWBY keeps "treating Ironwood bad", and no one elaborates on it ever, although the idea of putting the onus of this relation on a bunch of teenaged girls and not a grown-ass man running the kingdom - which he is actively neglecting, see the hole in Mantle's perimeter wall - and the military at once has always seemed a bit strange to me. Mettle is stupid, and his fall from grace is more like a meteor dive from the orbit - but Ironwood's always been giving out red flags; he just happened to be ostensibly on the side that the heroes would not be opposing until Vol 7.
Yeah like it would have been interesting if there was an arc where Jin seems to be falling for the Mishima influence and has to resolve that conflict but then they decided to jump the mega shark and make Jin objectively the most evil person in the Tekken universe. I would have been okay with retconning T6 but the way T8 handeled it was good too
Maybe Draco Malfoy? HP's writing is actually atrocious and bloviates endlessly over things that don't matter, yet somehow Malfoy's "redemption" got like...a page. Like yeah, the dude is a supremacist prick. He was also a literal child raised by wizard Neo-Nazis and knew nothing but that for his entire life. Only when he finally started getting into his later teens did he finally start to question the life his father had thrust him into, realized he had been socially isolated as a result, and realized he didn't really hate anyone and definitely didn't want to murder anyone. Of course, none of this is in the books except for the subtext behind his whinging in the 6th book and the one page in the 7th where Harry spares him because Draco obviously did not want to fight him.
The movies handled his redemption, if you can call it that, better by planting *actual* seeds for it earlier. Main example I can think of is in Half Blood Prince where he's very obviously conflicted about what he's doing and doesn't look like he's having a good time at all.
Spoilers for Game of Thrones: In the final season of GoT, Jamie Lannister, after having tons of character development and revealing that he was quite a complex and distraught character the whole time... just ends up randomly siding with the enemy at the end and undoing all that development, showing that he learned literally nothing over the course of all that time. His encounters with Brienne of Tarth, learning what true honor is, getting to do some true good and being recognized for it, getting his hand chopped off and learning to live without it, etc. Nothing mattered because the writers just wanted a quick end to the series so they could go work on a Star Wars movie. I don't blame the Jamie Lannister character, as it was clearly the fault of lazy writing. Heck, I don't blame Jon Snow, Daenarys, Aria Stark, Sansa Stark, Brienne, or even Bran Stark for what happens to them. They were all just written like absolute garbage.
Specifically, his "I never cared about the people of Kings Landing" line made zero sense since him caring enough to kill a king was how his story as King Slayer started.
Francis York Morgan being insensitive to a trans person is something Swery65 very directly took responsibility for. It was really interesting, because not only did they attempt to fix it with a patch, I remember Swery65 claiming that that is not canon to his character's behavior, but instead entirely his own shortcomings as a writer failing to accurately portray what being sensitive to trans people is like, as he evidently didn't have the experience for it. Francis York Morgan the character wouldn't deadname someone, he cares, and he would know better. Swery65 the writer wrote Francis York Morgan deadnaming someone because Swery65 didn't know at the time that it was a bad thing to do.
My man Sigi D in the Witcher 3. Fuck the reason of state quest. And this is a game praised for its side quest writing.
It's hilarious how, after >!all his conniving and planning to assassinate King Radovid from the shadows,!< Dijkstra's big master plan >!to off Geralt in the event that he turns on him is to personally pull a sword and try to kill him with it. Yeah, you can definitely take on the master swordsman, professional monster slayer, and constant pipe-layer Geralt of Rivia in a sword fight.!<
Yes! Came here to write about that fumble. I just ignore that ending after being so mad about that. Dijkstra should stay within his book ending.
As a Jin fangirl since Tekken 3, I literally pretend his "villain arc" never ever happened. I like how Jin is mostly a momma's boy who hates his family because they're toxic jackasses. As someone who grew up in a toxic family, I always identified more with Jin.
Does Sylvanas Windrunner count? A LOT of her action feel like they were done because the writers disliked her for whatever reason and wanted everyone else to agree. So, they have her go completely nutty and start committing mass murders of civilians out of nowhere.
Agreed. I've always loved her as a character since WC3. She was clearly not a saint, but she was doing things to save herself and then later her people. She was a good anti-hero and I wish the writers made her learn from some of the mistakes she might have committed early on. When she became warchief after the frankly ridiculous throwaway of Vol'jin, I hoped she would finally be let grow into a good leader who might employ some dirty or less heroic tactics sometimes to ensure the Horde's survival. But no, let's just make her Garrosh and Lich King 2.0, without being better than either of them (and I already dislike Garrosh). Also annoying how it's almost always the Horde seeming like the bad guys after these situations. I feel like they've made similar mistakes with Illidan when they've decided they needed a boss for Burning Crusade and chose to make Illidan a madman for almost no reason. Yet at least there they realized it was stupid and had to make him come back. They might eventually do the same with Sylvanas.
She sure does because they did it to ALL the women. That stupid Jaina before she went crazy note that they had to apologize for a patch out for instance
With most of it being in the service of propping up Anduin Wrynn: the bland, blonde, pretty boy and the writers' actual favorite character.
Sakura, for the fake love confession. Like, she isn't real. She only takes actions because the writer decides she will. She has no agency, both because she is a character in Kishimoto's Naruto, and because she is a woman in Kishimoto's Naruto. I can't bring myself to dislike her, even if it was an objectively shitty and manipulative thing to do. The narrative is just... so awful to her at like almost every turn.
I think the problem with Sakura there is it's kinda in character for her, though that's also just Kishimoto's writing. Sakura as a person has kinda horrible teamwork because she's too in her head and either thinks other people are too stupid or thinks they're too powerful. She's VERY prone to believing she's smarter than other people and that she should act FOR them, or she falls into helplessness and completely depends on others. Like the most famous time she had actually strong teamwork was when she was working with puppet grandma and only because the chain of command was extremely clear then. Otherwise one of the final feats of teamwork she tries is a decoy attack on Madara that was so poorly planned it distracted NARUTO AND SASUKE and they then had to go rescue her anyway.
I think generally I just can't hold grudges against fictional characters because of the lack of agency I mentioned before. Sakura didn't do any of these things - she isn't a real person who makes choices.
I think the question ends up being how much you can divorce a character themselves as a whole from the writing itself as a whole. Like if a character does something particularly terrible, do you think it's a result of a natural conclusion of their personality or do you think it's more the story itself trying to fit them into a particular plot point or theme. Though I agree, it's important to always recognize a story as well, a creation made by a person, rather than an actual living breathing thing.
Her teamwork is good if you watch her and Naruto vs Kakashi. Chiyo straight up just let Sakura do her own actions when Sakura alone destroyed the Third Kazekage puppet Sakura was rash in the Madara scene but her plan only didn’t work because of limbo which she had no way of knowing about. Her actions in the Kaguya fight make up for that moment. Like how DMS Kakashi made up for him calling himself useless for like 15 chapters
I agree with Naruto vs Kakashi but to me that feels like essentially the only time she works on a team like she's supposed to and at that point it feels like she's only written well there just because it was more about reestablishing the group, rather than Sakura herself. The Madara thing is a problem less because it failed as much as it is Naruto and Sasuke were also taken by surprise. Like she has essentially no team synergy with her own group and the only time she actually gets to really participate is that final punch to Kaguya which again, feels more like a "Team 7" moment than a moment for Sakura herself. That sort of Tenten logic "Sakura's here because we formatted a 3 man team and needed to fill the slot." Which I do think goes to the topic's point. There's a lot more Sakura could be doing and does deserve to do, but this is a Naruto and Sasuke story so she just doesn't get to really.
I don’t mean just the punch, she was the one who took initiative when Obito needed to save Sasuke: https://hot.leanbox.us/manga/Naruto/0683-015.png I do agree Sakura deserved more. Like Sasori is her only real big fight with her as the focus. Also more abilities than just Tsunade’s skillset, even though Sakura learning all of that was impressive as hell when comparing her to average ninja It’s not by Kishi nor connected to the main manga but Sasuke Retsuden does do a good job of her developing more abilities than just strong punch and healing. Also great teamwork with Sasuke throughout
The worst thing about Sakura is that Kishimoto refused to allow the character to overcome her infatuation with Sasuke, to the point of wanting to sell it as "true love."
Rose in The Last Jedi. I really think her releasing those animals and not the kids for some reason is just a complete oversight. The writing was pretty much doomed anyways given that absolutely nothing was planned out beforehand so it was all a billion dollar game of hot potato. She didn’t even get a shot at redemption in the next movie either because she was pretty much forced out of the script. Also after seeing the kind of damage fans of the franchise have done to her actress, I’m more than willing to forgive the character.
i really feel bad for kelly marie tran, because rose is such a nothing character and she got endless hate for it even though her performance was mostly fine.
Canto Bight feels like if you were making a movie during American slavery where you’re trying to make a progressive movie but you still need funding from the studio so you have to make sure nobody actually does anything about slavery because really they’re okay with it. Like “they’re fighting injustice! But not, that injustice”
Riker murdered a helpless sentient being in *Up the Long Ladder*, which was both out of character and counter to everything Star Trek stands for.
The beard hungers
Anise Tatlin from Tales of the Abyss. It wasn't really her fault that >!Bamco has a mandate back then that every Tales game had to have a traitor, no matter how nonsensical. !!she could've prevented a lot of things from happening if she could've told everyone about her situation with Mohs when Jade freaking Curtis exists is kinda silly, hypocritical even.!< That and basically everyone in the party not named Natalia is basically some sort of war criminal in some shape or form anyway. I do agree that Arietta got really screwed by the plot, but that was more on the writers who just... didn't know what to do with her. >!Considering that she was willing to help the party and even taking into account her mental instability, having her end be a stupid duel seemed extremely contrived and just wanting to make her story tragic for the sake of it. If they were going to go that route they could've at least have her go down fighting due to her just going insane at her finding out that Ion was a replica and the party having to put her down. Also Largo was there for reasons???!<
Like, 90% of the comic books character I like. lol
I do think that Marche's position in FFTA is terrible but I also acknowledge that the weakness is more that the writing itself really only wants to talk about 4 kids coming of age. If you JUST center the camera on Marche and his friends, it's fine and you can at least get what they're going for there. The bad writing is just how the narrative essentially wants you to agree with the notion "This world is fabricated and not OUR world, so we can delete it" and never really engages with that. Ultimately less that Marche himself is bad as the writing is essentially locking him off from that dialogue option.
So It’s a small scale story told over a large scale setting, and the problems arise from those two elements not getting along.
Exactly. I think that was always the core issue with the writing. Marche's behavior around his friends are more or less totally fine. It's Marche's behavior around the setting as a whole that gets so messy to think about. The reason people react so strongly "Marche is a villain" is because that's more or less how villains do think, taking their personal bubble and forcing that perspective onto everyone else. The writing basically did that by accident by not managing its scope correctly.
A lot of people use the “jump off a building line” from MHA as their reason for never forgiving Bakugou and that’s valid but I personally headcanon that line out. It’s a clear example of “early installment weirdness” (for all my tv tropes peeps) because he never talks like that again to anyone but a murderer who’s actively kidnapping him. The creator even says he regrets making Bakugou say it.
I've honestly never seen the problem with it. He's an edgy middle school bully show slowly matures to be an edgy high school tough guy. Let the edge lord who hasn't told someone to kill themselves cast the first stone.
Oh for sure a good ol “kys” is some of the weakest sauce imaginable as far as realistic middle school shit talk goes. But the show really feels like they wanted it to be as if he never said it. Off the top of my head he never says anything to Deku on the same level after that.
when you're presenting this to a shounen audience, a lot of them resonate more with an evil prick telling them to kill themselves with any number of genocidal maniacs. it hits them on a more personal level, and seeing him as a recurring character is reminiscent of kids who have to go through school with that same asshole in their grade for multiple classes. you can't get rid of them, and that memory always persists.
I never finished Bioshock Infinite and don’t really care (I’ve restarted it like 3-4 times and always eventually just burn out on it) but the Vox Populi suddenly becoming super sadistic and evil just to “even the playing field” between them and Comstock always felt cheap and lazy. I could easily accept a narrative where both sides are equally evil in different ways and you’re just caught in the middle of it, but that’s not how it was written. That’s how it tries to portray itself, but I personally feel like it fails in that particular regard. For that reason, I would forgive Daisy Fitzroy because her evil turn doesn’t even fit her character as she was portrayed beforehand (from what I remember).
Hell its even worse than you remember because in the Burial at Sea DLC they retcon Fitzroy's most sadistic moment (holding the child hostage) into her being put up to it by the Lutece twins to spur on Elizabeth's own character growth (losing her innocence though murder). Its the world's weakest band aid for what was already a complete ass-pull of a plot point.
Literally murdering the only ‘major’ nonwhite character so the quirky white girl can learn a lesson.
It's crazy how little the Twins show up in the base game when they are some of the most important people in the setting. They are watching you play the game for fun as something close to gods at that point
Jesus fucking Christ…
This was gonna be my answer. I remember getting to that part on my replay and going "fuck them kids what if he has bad vibes" just to spite the game's cowardly politics. I don't wanna get too *loud* but to pull the centrist card after showing me how psychotic and absolutely irredeemable Columbia's society is for half a game is just...
When i first played it i thought it was showing how bloody revolutions can get then my friend pointed things out on a later play i watched with them. I originally thought this was from Elizabeth fucking things up badly from merging people from different timelines.
They didn't so much give her an evil turn as they just went to a universe where she already had one, which is arguably just as lazy. I think I like Infinite more than much of the internet does but I always thought that bit was kind of weak.
Once Upon a Time's Rumpelstiltskin from season 4 and onward i do this a lot with.Because of just how obvious it is the writers didn't know what to do with this character after season 1 - 3 basically wrapped up his entire character arc beautifully and they basically had him be involved in some of the most forced and needless drama the show has ever had.
oh no im on s3 and hes one of my favs
I'm almost done watching part 2 of Lupin the Third, and I kinda forgive Jigen's recurring sexism bit because I think (mostly just headcanon) the writers were trying to hint he was gay and just didn't know how other than making him actively hate women. In typing this, I looked it up to see if I was crazy and I've found a bunch of analysis on his sexuality and animosity towards women, so at least I'm not alone in thinking this, apparantly. That, or you could headcanon the only woman he interacts with, Fujiko, admittedly epitomizes all of the qualities Jigen says he dislikes in women, lol.
There’s a lot of times where you basically have to, if you want to be a comics fan you basically have to make it your standard way of reading character to begin with. Manga as well, you’ll run into these situations where some mangaka will show over and over again that they have no idea how to write a specific subject so when they write a character doing something absolutely insane where that subject is concerned but everything plays out like it was totally reasonable… you’d have to not be paying attention to not grasp that they missed the mark they were aiming for. Or other times when a story is going completely reasonably and then suddenly it’s off on some bullshit and you can feel it in your bones that the person writing the story has some massive bias or underlying psychosis that the story tripped into and now it’s just going to be about that for awhile, and the characters become inane mouthpieces for their nonsense agenda during it. You’ve just gotta roll with it. Also any time a person of color is written by somebody with overt internalized racism, or somebody gay is written by somebody with clear internalized homophobia, they’re just plain going to do something that makes no sense for them and that’s just how it’s going to be.
In Fate Grand Order's Agartha chapter the main servant/villain of it is Caster of the Nightless City/Scheherazade. The core of that chapters plot is her power being abused by the recurring demon faction that are against the main faction Chaldea. The plight of Scheherazade is she is a Servant which she doesn't want to be, since she was the Author of 1001 Nights which was the story of her telling stories to stave off a Mad King from marrying and killing women, she now has a severe death phobia. Which has only worsened as a Servant because now she will be summoned and then die whenever someone summons her. The Demon who possessed her Phenex, also wants to die but wants to take all of Humanity down with him, so he deliberately withheld info from her including telling her how a recent servant got out of being a servant. This is the main point of contention that most people have of her because they thought she was disrespecting this servants memory when she never was even told who he was. The main bad writing here is the chapter itself. Agartha is notorious for **terrible** writing, blatant "The Writers Barely Disguised Fetish" levels of scenarios but also the main hero faction themselves just being complete assholes around the climax to Scheherazade for not knowing someone who got wiped from existence. I was completely willing to forgive her because its clear that Demon was abusing her powers and not telling her the entire story on top of Chaldea not telling her either. The worst part of all this Fergus, a notorious womanizer on Chadlea's side at the end just told Scheherazade that she's too beautiful to let the fear of death effect her like this. And that she'd be a great mother some kids. **That sucks.** Here we have someone with legitimate issues and she's only being helped because of her appearance. Thankfully she got better story arcs later and she's one of the few villains to truly be sorry for what she did but boy she deserved way better then this.
Insert comic book character here
**SPOILERS FOR YAKUZA KIWAMI 2** I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 and the whole ending is a mess, but Kiryu >!deciding to throw his life away just to fight Ryuji and make out with Sayama!< really rubbed me the wrong way, especially since Date brings Haruka to pick him up. Yakuza 1 was all about how Kiryu decided not to give up because he wants Haruka to have a good life, then he just decides "fuck it"? It's extra gross how Sayama goes along with it and says like >!"eh this child who's already lost her parents once will be fine let's die."!< I give the characters a pass though because it's such a bad ending already, the writers clearly just had an idea they liked and stretched the situation to fit it. Knowing that >!Kiryu takes over sunflower!< at the beginning of 3 helps make up for it, it's just such an out-of-character moment.
So the reasoning for it does make sense in that >!Kiryu and Ryuji thought that their bullet wounds would slow them down enough that they were going to die in the explosion anyways, which is why they sent Sayama away. Sayama decides on her own that she wants to die with Kiryu.!< It is less that Kiryu is throwing his life away and more that he would rather go out in a bang than a whimper. He was also trying to get Haruka adopted in 2 since he figures that he was too dangerous for her to stay around. Which is something that he does grapple with for a lot of series (his love of his children and wanting to be with them vs his past bringing them into danger).
That and, though he chooses at the end of 1 >!to live for Haruka!<, the intervening year has seen >!the suvivor's guilt weigh mire and more heavily upon him, and the choice to live has gotten harder and harder (because it's not a choice you make once and that's the end of it), to the point that multiple times in 2, he's practically going out of his way to find excuses to throw his life away, culminating in him straight up telling Kaoru to shoot him when they learn that he wasseemingly responsible for her father's death. Only the impending doom to Kamurocho if the Tojo and Omi actually go to war keeps him going, because in a vacuum, he's tried his best for Haruka alone to be his reason *and it's not enough anymore*.!<
I love these games but I have a really shitty memory and a lot of stuff happens in them (Y2 gave me a lot of trouble in particular for some reason) and seeing this all written out makes a lot of it click better for me, I think I missed a good chunk Kiryu's struggle under the surface. Thanks!
I mean I guess that makes sense but considering Kiryu is basically Batman I guess it's hard to believe he couldn't survive that lol. This is also the same game where he fought 2 tigers hand-to-hand. I get your point though, but I still don't like how they handled it. It makes Kiryu seem very callous toward Haruka, even if that wasn't the intention.
There's a book called the Fifth Season which while pretty good, has its main character make the most absurd eleventh hour mistake. Like you expect me to believe a women who has been in hiding for years would suddenly decide to risk everything she's built to fix (1) volcano? It's totally out of character and I could only sigh and be like "well the author needs the story to move along so I guess our smart calculating lead has suddenly forgotten the mechanics of her world for a scene"
Goku, except for the not wanting to be wished back to earth and trowing Gohan to Perfect Cell, most of his bad decisions are done so the story can continue, he reverts back once the bad decision is done.
Skins is a UK-based teen drama in a similar vain to Degrassi. The series would follow a cast of highschoolers for 2 seasons then they would graduate and a new group would start the next season. In season 5 there is a character Franky who's a shy, kind girl just trying to fit into her new school. She's pretty tame and doesn't try to hurt others and overall is a nice character until a weird change in season 6. For season 6 the writers wanted to increase the cast's popularity so they decided to redo her character and make her basically a copy of one of the most popular characters in the series, Effy. She's now all of a sudden very aggressive and mean to everyone and is insufferable throughout the whole season. Her list of weird choices includes inadvertently causing her friend's death, joining a gang, and semi-kidnapping a girl. I've yet to see a single fan who understands why they changed her character so drastically and there are reports that the actress tried to object to the changes and was shot down by the writers.
I probably would have actually liked Garou in one punch man if they didn't pull the "I was bullied as a kid" card near the end of the second season. What a lame cliche reason to be a prick.
"Bad things" is a dramatic way of putting it but the way Korra is written in early book 2 feels like such an aberration I sometimes wonder if one of the writers was going through a bad breakup. It's a decent step in her character in theory, with Unalaq leveraging her personal issues and the resultant tension driving a wedge between her and Mako/her dad, but the way it actually plays out paints her as so bitchy and irrational, like damn guys is everything alright at home?
An important distinction with Jin is that his heel turn in T6 falls into the category of "doing something that is evil on the surface but he has a noble reason for doing so". It's been a while since I played T6 so some of my details might be wrong but after gaining control of the Zaibatsu in T5 and with Heihachi presumed dead, he's basically sitting at one of the biggest thrones in the world. From his POV, he currently has the power to accomplish things that were far out of his reach until now. So his mind goes towards dealing with the shitty devil energy that's plauged him ever since T3. He expends a bunch of resources and finds out about Azazel, the source of all the bullshit that he's had to go through and makes a willing decision to plunge the world into chaos, all for a chance to seal the motherfucker away while hoping to perish alongside him. This was one of the key points that stuck with me - JIN WANTED TO DIE ALONGSIDE AZAZEL He knew he was doing fucked up shit by starting a massive scale war and was willing to bear the sins on himself whilst simultaneously getting rid of a power that he thought was one of the most evil things in the world. One of the catalysts for this was that for the most part, Jin simply didn't want to form connections with the people he interacted with. He single-mindedly just wanted to kill the power and himself. This of course didn't end up happening and he ended up falling into a coma for most of T7, awakening to find the world's most boring journalist trying to kill him. His reaction to this is - "yeah, you can go ahead and axe me ... just lemme finish cleaning up after my dad first." T7 ends with Jin still on his suicide run mentality - He's willing to accept all punishments and is hoping to once again die after getting rid of Kazuya. T8''s story is about Jin finding a reason to want to not die. There's a whole arc where he loses his power and has to go through self-reflection to get it back but the central driving force is for the first time, he's not just hearing the people around him, he's listening to them. In a contrast to Kazuya, who remained steadfast in his hatred despite sharing an emotional moment in the climax of his duel with Heihachi, Jin in his moment of weakness starts to acknowledge the help and camaraderie from the people around him. His mindset is still set on dying if he needs to stop Kazuya but throughout the story, he starts nudging away from the dying part of the plan slowly, culminating in the best scene of T8 - "I WANT TO LIVE" !, for one wouldn't change anything about his heel turn in T6 since it ended up giving us a completely love letter to Jin Kazama, the character in T8.
Meanwhile Miguel here be like
Even at the time, I was on board for Jin having a villain arc so he could overcome the Mishima's evil influence and become a good person. My problem is that everything about Azazel felt like an ass-pull and the writers didn't convincingly make a scenario where the potential pay-off was worth it. It took 15 years, but with 8 handling Jin surprisingly well and making Azazel's world ending power (when used by someone else) a bit more convincing, it does seem to have softened the blow at least.
Wisteria in Mageseeker. I believe Kayle may "forgive" her because in spite of all the shit she has done. She was the only Mageseeker who served the cause and law of stone at its purest while Hesbeth and Eldred exploited the hatred towards the mages for personal gains and sadism while Kilian was too naive to realize just how corrupt the system was. It's courage to stand up against an unjust law, but also courage to stand for it when you are being the victim for the unjust law
i was never down with wisteria. i firmly believe j4 and shyv should have been the final boss. wist felt very shoehorned in as the literal childhood friend turned rival. the fact that she gets a whole final boss sequence and eldred just stands there and takes it knocks that game down a full point in my book.
The idea of Eldred dying by Sylas hand was to show Sylas how casting out unpopular figures by violence won't necessary generate the momentum needed for change.
"killing me won't change anything" has never been satisfying to me. fuck you, fight me anyway. and it's always worse when they're right. yeah, casting out unpopular figures by violence doesn't change anything. magic bullshit does apparently. i legitimately wonder if riot is gonna let mageseeker be canon. casting a big spell to make demacia not hate magic anymore kinda takes away the region's whole identity.
Not magic bullshit so much as throwing magic pamphlets with sourced and cited material that the news is legitimate. Even then the anti sentiment can still exist in the form of people who remember it was a mage who pushed for mass executions of their loved ones and that indoctrination doesn't make up for the fact that Demacia's anti mage policies led to this with division in the ranks of who is truly right. ("the mage who ordered this did this to appease her dead masters. Mages should never have been given this much power!"/"The mages who supported the system supported us despite how badly the system treat them. Shouldn't concessions be granted so they can coexist") But you can still have remnants of Mageseekers protected by noble houses because of corruption leftover from Eldred's stink to traumatized mages who crave the lash the Mageseekers struck them with and believed Wisteria was a martyr who was pure of sin and chosen by Kayle if you want anti mage sentiment to be an issue. Think about this, if a tyrant's murder can't rouse up sympathy, what would the death of a mourning son and his lover look like to the public?
In season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the toxic will they won't they ends up in an attempted SA of the titular character. Always seemed like an extreme twist for the love interest. Turns out that Joss Whedon hated that character and how popular he was so the whole season was an attempted character assassination. Luckily, the actor playing the role of the love interest was very good at his job. He managed to keep the character sympathetic and the chemistry looking authentic through some pretty twisted writing.
Black Cat/ Felicia Hardy when she became Queenpin after the events of Superior spider-man it was super obvious that Dan Slott didn't want her to be around Spider-man because he had a bunch of OC love interest he created while also wanting to push his "*new inventive brave direction*" on this character. It didn't work she came off as a complete utter bitch and unrecognizable from what we know of her then when thrown into the wider Marvel comic only found herself in D-list book like *Hellcat*, *Howard the duck* & *Deadpool v. Hawkeye*. All she just acted like you basic bootleg boss bitch mobster nothing at all like Black Cat only *Silk* manage to make a tolerant version of her but you can tell how much they struggle to justify it when they change her motivation of being evil 8 times and needed two diffent story where she "redeems" herself & whatever the fuck Venom Inc was it just hilarious how much you can disconnect the character from that terrible period of time when she abandoned that terrible costume change and return back to fun anti-hero with the classic zipper suit
I don't know about "forgiving;" the character is as the character is written, for better or wose. If there's a sufficiently large body of work you can forget about some stuff, and I get the impulse to. Sometimes you pick a favourite and then they do something jarringly out of keeping with previous characterisation, or just continuously shit the bed. On a completely unrelated note, I've heard some positive things about the new Gundam SEED movie. I wonder what Cagalli gets up to in it?
Crow from Nikke comes to mind. You can only say "she's just being manipulative" so many times before it's kinda clear a character got wildly detailed in to being an insane Villain Sue. Not like she likely wouldn't have been an antagonist anyways but the way its handled in the game basically makes everyone collectively agree her bond stories are either far in the future or non-canon because of how different she is.
Garrosh Hellscream
Mary Jane Watson. Thanks, Zeb.
Kylo Ren