Fallen Creator

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"If reincarnation is true, I hope I come back as George Lucas just to find out what it's like to be loved and hated in equally large amounts by exactly the same people." —Youtube user kasolarUK

There you are, riding high on all your success. The critics adore you. Your fans worship you. The Hollywood Hype Machine has put maximum force behind your career. The money is coming in, and nobody dares speak ill of you. You made that work that inspired the hearts of millions. It seems like everything you touch turns to pure, brilliant art. Just the announcement of your name brings anticipation to whatever you're doing next. There's just nothing you could ever do wrong.

Then it happens. You do something wrong -- and it's very wrong. Your first flop.

Suddenly, things don't look so rosy. You just can't recover from that flop. Everything after this flop starts to define you instead, and you can't recapture or recreate the success of the works that made you famous in the first place. Your positive reviews shrink; your aura of invincibility is forever punctured. Your fanbase is fractured and shrinking. The Hype Machine pushing you forward has now moved on to others. In the most extreme cases, just hearing your name attached to a work, even one connected to those beloved pieces you created in the past, makes people cringe where they once cheered. You are now a Fallen Creator.

The life of an artist is full of ups and downs. Unfortunately, some creators, after achieving great commercial and critical success, lose their momentum; their prestige falls far below their previous stature.

Not everyone goes from the very top to the very bottom. Those old franchises still make a lot of money. There's usually just enough people willing to watch your new stuff that you can still be considered commercially successful, even if they're also treating it as Snark Bait. But the love is gone, and your flaws are now constantly on display. The acclaim and hyper-success has dropped, and a once solid and large fanbase is now far less likely to be happy with you.

The true defining trait of the Fallen Creator is the large drop in prestige, even after factoring out the usual Fan Dumb that chases creators wherever they go. It is not necessarily permanent; even if it is, there could still be a partial comeback. Artistic taste can be fickle.

This can sometimes be caused by a combination of Misblamed and hubris. The original good productions were a team effort, but one guy took all the credit and was recognized as the sole genius behind the work. When the team breaks up and the sole spotlight hog sets out on his own, people quickly realize he's nothing without his team when he suddenly gets a string of failures. See also Protection From Editors.

An artist developing a Small Name, Big Ego can also trigger this; no matter how talented the creator is, people are only going to tolerate a certain amount of ill-advised egocentric vanity projects and diva-ish tantrums before they start giving up. Same can happen to companies who have bad public relations for one reason or another.

Compare Never Live It Down, in which a creator is only identified with the worst thing they ever did; they may have done successful work before and since, but they never had the prestige and adoration that makes a Fallen Creator. Can also overlap with Deader Than Disco. Sort of the opposite of He Really Can Act, when someone despised proves they can do well.

Contrast Auteur License, Prima Donna Director, Scapegoat Creator. See also Career Resurrection for when the disgraced manage to get acclaimed again.

Note: Please, only give examples where it's clear that public opinion has pretty much turned against these people and they're not thought of as highly as before. This is not meant as a Take That against creators you don't like. If you yourself think a creator has declined, but the general public still thinks highly of him/her, then don't add them as an example.

Examples of Fallen Creator include:

• Comic Books
• Film
• Music
• Professional Wrestling
• Video Games

Anime and Manga

• For several people, Tite Kubo is heading this way. While Bleach was originally well received for its quirky characters, awesome fights, and an insane plot twist in the Soul Society arc, for many, things went way downhill afterwards. A massive case of Arc Fatigue, many odd plot threads, and Aizen being turned into a Villain Sue have caused many people to start hating the series, and Kubo himself has been accused of trolling his fanbase.
• Masashi Kishimoto as well, with Creator's Pet Sasuke Uchiha being such a Base Breaker and all the Wham Episodes and Mind Screws of recent chapters of Naruto. Much like Tite Kubo, fans are considering him a Trolling Creator for these reasons.

Literature

• Orson Scott Card is also an excellent example of this trope in action. Between Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, the early books of the Alvin Maker series, and even his work on games like Monkey Island, Card was easily one of the best sci-fi/fantasy authors of the '80s and early '90s. But he took a turn with the increasingly political and continuity-contradictory Ender's Shadow series and Advent Rising. Now Card can't seem to write anything without having to rehash his political views and run them smack dab into the plot as he did in Empire. His online non-fiction essays and blogosphere reaction to them also made his more controversial social and political views much more visible and hotly-debated, reaching a peak with an article (which he later back-pedalled from) that appeared to suggest that legalisation of gay marriage in the US would justify armed revolution against the government. Now just the mere mention of his name can cause problems, such as his work on the plot for Shadow Complex.
  • Then he rewrote Hamlet and explained that Hamlet's father was a gay pedophile who was killed by Horatio because he molested him as a child. Oh and he, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern all turned gay because of it. It ends with Hamlet damned him to Hell, where his father tells them now they can be together. This was initially published in an anthology, and then someone somehow decided that it should have wider release.
• Despite its obvious flaws, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series was popular amongst teenage girls and their mothers, for its portrayal of a homely young teenage girl (so bland that the reader could effortlessly slip into her shoes), a sparkly, handsome, protective vampire, and their chaste love affair. The last book in the series. Breaking Dawn, was riddled with continuity errors and Character Derailment, and suddenly had Bella become a sex addict, get pregnant after her first sexual encounter, and give birth in a scene that involved her vomiting up "a fountain of blood," getting her spine broken, and having the baby delivered via her husband ripping into her stomach with his teeth. If the birth scene alone didn't Squick out the fans, Jacob's subsequent imprinting on Bella's newborn baby surely did the trick. Not long after this, Meyer announced that she wouldn't be writing her follow-up novel Midnight Sun because a segment of her first draft had been leaked on the internet. Fans were not impressed.
  • Statements that her next book is about "time-travelling, cannibal mermaids" aren't helping either.
    • To be fair, that's almost definitely a Mondegreen (she was listing various ideas in an interview and spoke a bit too quickly, making them sound like one bizarre one).
• Anne Rice was a groundbreaking author (and partially responsible for creating the goth/vampire subculture.) Then in the early '90s, she started demanding Protection From Editors, and the quality of her writing took a sharp turn downward.
  • Of course, it didn't help matters much when she became quite religious, declaring that she had "consecrated [her] work to Jesus Christ" and was now committed to writing Christian fiction, which didn't seem to go terribly over well, nor her adamant stance against fanfiction or her blow-up on Amazon.com after poor reviews.
    • And then this. How many slippery slopes can one person go through anyway? In any case, people are still awaiting something to make up for the Amazon incident....
  • A while after she had all fanfics removed and banned from Fanfiction.net, even the harmless comedy ones, she also stopped feeding fodder to the people writing them; the GLBT community and yaoi fans, which made up a good chunk of her fandom at the time.
• Martin Amis, possibly. After writing for a while, he struck it big with Money, and continued his success with books such as London Fields and The Information. Then came Yellow Dog, which despite being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize was reviewed extremely harshly (The Daily Telegraph even compared it to "your favourite uncle being caught in the playground masturbating"). He managed to recover some success with House of Meetings and The Pregnant Widow, but those also received mixed reviews and average sales. Time will tell if he manages to get his momentum back.
• Transylvanian poet KAF (Kovacs Andras Ferenc) used to be a talented author, with some very good poems. He's still talented but for the past few years, his writing has been influenced by alcohol, and it shows.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe authors Karen Traviss and Troy Denning have been hit by this. Traviss' works started out with the hit Hard Contact, which is considered one of the best Clone Wars novels written, and then delivered the well received Triple Zero. But following these books, her bias towards Mandalorians and her demonizing of the Jedi left EU readers divided. Things only got worse with her contributions to Legacy of the Force, where she managed to kill off two beloved fan favorites in disappointing fashion, and delegating the main plot to the sideline to make way for the Mandalorians. Her abrasive attitude towards people who disagreed with her on Star Wars message boards gained her a sizable Hatedom. She has since left writing in the EU due to contractual reasons, but mentioning her is surefire Flamebait for some. Since then, she has moved on to the Gears of War universe and is slated to start writing the next set of Halo novels.^[when?] Only time will tell if she will alienate those fanbases as well.
  • Troy Denning made a big hit with the novel Star by Star, a book which defined the New Jedi Order series. He followed up on this with the Dark Nest Trilogy, on which opinions are all over the place. He has been accused of major Character Derailment in Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi. Fans are divided on whether his Darker and Edgier approach to Star Wars is the best for the Expanded Universe.
  • Troy Denning is also averages on "mixed blessing" in Forgotten Realms fandom - could be worse, but his Character Derailment and lore inconsistencies are not nearly as blatant as that of some other authors.
  • Karen Traviss wrote the second-last book of Legacy of the Force and Troy Denning wrote the last book. Karen had Jaina learning new fighting techniques and other things from the Mandalorians in the second-last book. Troy, according to reviewers, did not show Jaina really applying what she had learned from the Mandalorians to her fights with her brother Jacen in the last book. It can be inferred from this that Troy did not like Karen treating the Mandalorians as important over everything else, that he was willing to mess up the story just to give her the finger, and that he considered her a Fallen Creator like everyone else.
    • In addition to Troy Denning, the writings in both Christie Golden's and Aaron Allston's works in the Fate of the Jedi series indicate that no love was lost between them and Karen after her departure.
• An earlier example for Star Wars is Kevin J. Anderson. At the time of publication, his Jedi Academy Trilogy was well received, (not to mention creating a huge part of the EU), he was riding high on his Tales of the Jedi comics for Dark Horse, he was heavily involved in reference books such as The Illustrated Star Wars Universe and the original Essential Guide series and he edited the still-popular Tales From anthology collections. Cracks began to show when he wrote the divisive Dark Empire comics, which are allegedly George Lucas' favourite EU stories (for what it's worth) but included the notorious resurrection of Emperor Palpatine and Dark Side Luke. Then Michael A. Stackpole wrote I, Jedi, pointing out the MASSIVE number of problems with the JAT, and now Kevin J. doesn't write Star Wars books anymore. Dune fans can also be sent into frothing seizures at the mention of Anderson as well.
• Chuck Wendig, an author of Star Wars novels and comics, was fired by Marvel Entertainment in October 2018 for controversial behavior on his Twitter feed. A comic book miniseries, Shadow of Vader, and an unannounced Star Wars novel were cancelled as a result of his firing.
• For several years, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter has been criticized by the LGBTQ+ community and various ethnic minority groups for the bigotry considered rampant within her books. Among the more prominent examples of such Unfortunate Implications are the Gringotts goblins evoking stereotypes of Greedy Jews, the lazy naming schemes used for various foreign students and locations (the Chinese Cho Chang, the Indian Padma Patil, an Asian school of magic named "Mahoutokoro"...), and making lycanthropy an allegory for AIDS (with a character that actively sought to spread lycanthropy to children). Then in late 2019, she began to openly make statements espousing bigotry against transgender people (especially trans women), as well as throwing her support behind other people doing the same. This reached a peak with her mis-representative support and defense of Maya Forstater, who lost an employment tribunal against her former employer after being fired for various tweets likening trans women to rapists and effectively calling them "men in disguise", among other comments. Much of public opinion has since turned against her as she has continually doubled down on those views since, with various groups from fan sites all the way up to the main actors of the film adaptations condemning Rowling, not to mention Warner Bros de-emphasizing her role in the Wizarding World franchise and offering apologies in regards to her sociopolitical views. Rowling's case has not been helped by her defenders and supporters, who have often only reinforced the worse traits of those who share her beliefs.

Live Action TV

• During the hit days of The X-Files, Chris Carter was untouchable. Then, people started accusing him of just making the show's 'mythology arc' up as he went along. Since The X-Files ended, he hasn't had much in the way of his former success; his last project, the second X Files movie, was widely criticized.
• Ben Elton was a leading figure of alternative comedy in the eighties and, among other things, co-wrote The Young Ones and Blackadder (which he helped grow its literal beard). Several less popular shows, novels, and West End productions plus a perceived shift in politics later, his name is more or less code for "talentless hack." For many critics and fans, The Thin Blue Line was the turning point, as on the basis of The Young Ones and Blackadder many people were expecting it to be a vicious black comedy about police incompetence, corruption, brutality and racism. What they got was a more traditional sitcom in the vein of Dad's Army.
  • Elton was at one point doing well as a novelist, Popcorn and Dead Famous in particular being both bestsellers and critically well-received; but he hit a low point in 2005 with The First Casualty which not only did not sell well and was panned in reviews, but also earned him a "Bad Sex Awards" nomination for the worst sex scene in fiction that year. None of his subsequent books have recovered his former success.
  • In 2011 Elton wrote and presented a stand-up / sketch comedy variety show in Australia, Ben Elton Live From Planet Earth which was heavily promoted as something of a comeback and intended to be a flagship for Channel Nine, the station it was airing on. Unfortunately for him, viewers and critics largely agreed that it was actually a contender for one of the worst shows of the year, it was widely pilloried as dated, unfunny and hackneyed, and hemorrhaged from 805,000 viewers to 233,000 over the first episode alone. It was eventually cancelled after three episodes, and it looks unlikely that Elton's going to be returning to the screen any time soon.
• Toshiki Inoue was a great writer for various Tokusatsu shows like Changerion, Choujin Sentai Jetman and Kamen Rider Agito. While Kamen Rider Faiz was not bad, his part in the insane Executive Meddling that befell Kamen Rider Hibiki proved to be quite a blow, though really, he was Misblamed - if he hadn't done as he was told, he'd have been replaced just like his predecessors were (see J. Michael Straczynski before One More Day was known to be Joe Quesada's doing.) He was never really as successful in writing something as his early day works, as seen with Kamen Rider Kiva, the lowest rated and least commercially successful Rider series to date. Inoue may be showing a return to form in writing the Jetman episode of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, which was well-received with fans and gave the show a slight ratings bump.
• Verity Lambert was the producer who helped Doctor Who get under way, in no small part due to her disregarding the initial instructions given to her by The BBC. She enjoyed similar levels of success in her subsequent projects, and in the '70s and '80s was widely considered to be the top drama producer in the UK. Then, in the early 90s she produced the infamous soap opera flop Eldorado (you may recognise the name from an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?), which knocked her reputation quite badly. She still amassed a decent list of credits (including Jonathan Creek) between then and her death in 2007, but her reputation never really recovered to the phenomenal levels it had reached in the preceding decades.
• Crossing Jordan did well for writer Tim Kring, but he garnered tons of notice after he made Heroes. There were many Lost-like shows then, but Heroes not only become a popular phenomenon on its own but actually became more popular than Lost was by that point. It even got a Emmy nomination for Best Drama Series, rare for a sci-fi show. His popularity didn't decline with season 2, because the well-known writers' strike made whatever plans they'd had impossible, and he apologized for the season's flaws and promised to do better. Then came the universally-derided third season. Now critics and fans alike frequently say that the only way the show could improve would be if Tim Kring left, turning him from "the next JJ Abrams!" to a complete laughing stock.
  • With the show's cancellation, fans seem pretty convinced that it was actually Bryan Fuller who was responsible for the show's initial greatness, and that Tim Kring is a "nice idea, shame about the execution" kind of writer. Still, considering that Kring's early career was spent writing stuff like Teen Wolf 2, he can probably be proud that he gained any sort of reputation to squander in the first place.
  • Not helping was an interview where he throws blame around with reckless abandon as to why the ratings were drying up, not saving any of it for himself. He also said that his initial "apology" was taken out of context and he's never felt the need to actually apologize for any part of the series.
  • And there was also the infamous "saps and dipshits" comment Kring made at a screenwriting con, when he claimed that DVR was ruining serialized shows like Heroes. Given that these comments came at a time when the suckage of Season 3 was hitting fans full-force, nobody was inclined to read his comments very charitably.

"The engine that drove [serialized TV] was you had to be in front of the TV [when it aired]. Now you can watch it when you want, where you want, how you want to watch it, and almost all of those ways are superior to watching it on air. So [watching it] on air is related to the saps and the dipshits who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way."

• Bruce Kalish went through this so fast among Power Rangers fans it borders on Mood Whiplash. The first season he produced was SPD, which was received well by fans (though it had quite a few holes that didn't escape notice, while not ruining the show for most.) The next that he did was Mystic Force which... wasn't. After that, he produced Operation Overdrive, and somehow, It Got Worse (Overdrive is one of the three considered the worst of the show's entire run, alongside Turbo and Wild Force.) Jungle Fury was a little better, but now most fans consider his entire four-year run of the show a Dork Age for the series, and blame him for its near-cancellation (though Screwed by the Network actually carries equal responsibility.)
• Bryan Elsley, the creator of Skins, was once the favored writer among the Skins fandom. Lately, though, he has seen his star fall as a result of the utter failure of the American adaptation of Skins, which he helmed. (In addition to losing most of its advertisers thanks to Moral Guardians, the show had low ratings and was slammed by critics.) He particularly upset LGBT viewers, a group he had won over in large numbers with his treatment of the Naomi/Emily pairing in the British version, by playing the Bait and Switch Lesbians game with Tea in the US version. By contrast, Jamie Brittain, who used to be disliked due to his love of Shocking Swerves, has done a fairly good job with the new generation on the British show and has seen his popularity increase as a result. With Brittain's departure from the British version and Elsley's return to it with the US remake's cancellation, this has only increased as the sixth UK series has Jumped the Shark in the eyes of most fans, largely due to Brittain's and Elsley's competing visions for the Generation 3 characters.

Newspaper Comics

• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, after a screed he posted against the "men's rights" movement in 3/11 went viral, in which he essentially said that he agreed with them on every point, but they should "man up" and stop complaining, because women get special treatment for the same reason as the mentally disabled. It didn't help him when he deleted it, or when he was exposed for defending himself with sock puppets, and it really didn't help when he posted an article a few months later saying that a number of "men behaving badly" stories in the news was due to society suppressing male nature - including the rape allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Julian Assange. He fairly clearly condemns rape, but the juxtaposition was enough for some, as well as his assertion that female urges were "encouraged."
  • Except, after shocking the American Socialists with revelation that not everyone who mocks corporate bureaucracy is going to support their witch-hunts, he did not kindly drop by wayside, but rather a lot of them did. Scott Adams predicted Donald Trump's victory. And wrote a book on that. Then agreed to give an interview that he knew will be used for a hit piece, closely followed by him publishing analysis of it as an example of dishonest press techniques. Then he proceeded to demonstrate other failings of those socialists, stopping just shy of plainly calling them lunatic thugs. And for good measure ran several times over the warming cult, including a highlight of the incident when Bill Nye "the Science Guy" inadvertently demonstrated that his loud conviction is not rooted in science.
• DC Simpson, creator of Ozy and Millie. Quite a few things have contributed to this. Ozy and Millie was nearly mainstream, and received some notable press for a webcomic. Things got shaky with her fans beginning with Raine Dog, which was heavily criticized for its heavy-handed political content, with the blue dog standing in for "Blue State" Democrats at one point. Then It Got Weirder with a page depicting Raine making out with a young boy, which caused far too many Unfortunate Implications for fans to get behind it. As the result of one message board's negative response to her comic, Simpson disowned the board. Not much has happened in regard to Simpson after her Vaporware attempt at a syndicated comic, Girl, which was better received than Raine Dog, but still heavily criticized due to the fact that many of the jokes were recycled from Ozy and Millie, and fans opined that the recycled gags were far funnier in the context of Ozy and Millie and made less sense in the context of Girl (specifically, that the new strip had no context for the jokes, being that it was intended for syndication).

Pinball

• During and well after his tenure at Bally-Williams, pinball designer John Popadiuk was renowned for such games like Tales of the Arabian Nights, Cirqus Voltaire, and Theatre of Magic. When the company shuttered in 1999, however, he was laid off, and later in 2011 started his own pinball company called Zidware. He accepted pre-orders for three expensive titles (Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland and Alice in Wonderland). Initial excitement subsided to worry among Popadiuk's customers from a lack of communication, plenty of secrecy, and the fact that he only displayed empty cabinets at pinball shows for back-to-back years. These concerns came true in 2015, when Popadiuk announced that funding for the projects had dried up. He claimed that Magic Girl would be produced by a third-party, and that those who purchased the other two games could switch to Magic Girl at a loss...while also signing a form agreeing not to sue him. The revelation outraged the pinball community (just sit back, grab the popcorn and watch the infamous Pinside Forums implode right when the news broke). Popadiuk's reputation has vastly deteriorated since then, and currently it's unknown whether or not there'll be a positive resolution from this debacle.

Radio

• Howard Stern: For years, favorite targets of Howard Stern's ridicule included the obscenely rich, extreme political activists, famous people coerced by their spouses into promoting their attempts at also being famous, those that remarried people much younger than them, other celebrities he perceived as lazy or undeserving of their fortune and fame, and entertainers that stayed in their chosen profession much longer than they should have. Now^[when?] Howard is in his late 50s, has completed a 5-year 500 million dollar radio contract (only to be awarded another multi-year multi-hundred million dollar contract), and has a second wife (19 years his junior) who constantly promotes various silly animal charities and seems to be trying very hard to use Howard's fame to become a hostess, actress, or writer. Howard also seems less interested in the radio show and only works in the city of New York 3-4 days a week before running back to his home in the ritzy Hamptons in Long Island. Some of his fans are less than pleased with what he has become.

Theater

• He was never a critical favorite, but in The Seventies and The Eighties most of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals were massive international hits -- Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, and above all The Phantom of the Opera. Then Aspects of Love came along, and while it had a good run in London, it never caught on elsewhere. Sunset Boulevard was better received but too expensive to prove profitable. Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game were barely noticed outside of the U.K. while By Jeeves and The Woman in White both managed disappointing Broadway runs at the Turn of the Millennium. The 2004 movie version of Phantom managed to create a Broken Base for that show, and its stage sequel Love Never Dies resulted in further breaking, lasting less than two years in London and never making it to New York (though an Australian production has done well as of 2012). He still has success producing West End musical revivals hyped with the help of TV talent show competitions to find their leads.
• Julie Taymor became famous for her innovative work on The Lion King musical, winning two Tonys for her stage direction and costume design. From there, she started off what seemed like a strong film career with the critically acclaimed Titus and Frida (the latter earning six Oscar nods and winning two of them) while maintaining a strong presence in the theatre world with her 2006 production of the opera Grendel. Then Across the Universe came out, to mixed reviews and weak box office, followed by her critically trashed film of The Tempest. Her theatre career likewise crashed and burned with Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, whose Troubled Production status became memetic.

Web Original

• GradeAUnderA is a British-Asian Youtuber who makes Rant Comedy videos veering on Caustic Critic, Accentuate the Negative and Seinfeldian Conversation, with a very distinctive style of drawing his own MS Paint pictures for his videos and screaming into an iPhone. He also made some videos exposing controversial Youtubers like Vegan Gains (a vegan weigh-lifter with Internet Tough Guy tendencies), Jynx (a "reactionist") and Nicole Arbour (at a time when everyone reacted to her "Dear Fat People" video). This, combined with his activism for "#WTFU" and his "#MakeYouTubeGreatAgain" hashtag, a riff on Donald Trump's presidential slogan, made him incredibly famous in the community, gaining more than two million subscribers. However, in May 2016, GradeA made a video where he criticized the YouTube Drama phenomenon and Markiplier's vague, rambling video on the subject, among other things. His fanbase didn't appreciate GradeA's apparent hypocrisy on the subject and the Ad Hominem attacks against the Let's Player and his pink dyed hair. And then he tried to police his subreddit (the whole thing is detailed in this Reddit post). It didn't help that at the time, GradeA was friends with KEEMSTAR, the Drama Alert host who is infamous in the community and has been exposed by iDubbbzTV, among others. Accusations of hypocrisy were then thrown on his next drama video (calling for an end to YouTube Drama, even though he added more fuel to the fire with his videos and previously called out Youtubers for the exact same thought). With all this, a Hatedom against GradeA was born.
• Mark Haynes, better known as Alvin-Earthworm, was long hailed as one of the greatest sprite animators on Newgrounds and received much praise for Super Mario Bros. Z. However, as the years went by, Alvin started undergoing Creator Breakdown thanks to depression, which understandably caused delays in new episodes. As the years passed after the release of Episode 8, he continuously blamed the Vocal Minority of his fans for rushing him, eventually leading to the series cancellation in 2012. Three years later, he started looking like he was returning to form, having seemingly fought off his depression, with a revival of SMBZ, but when his Patreon was taken down in 2016 thanks to a DMCA from Nintendo, he became very embittered with the gaming company and fell right back into his depression, putting much of the blame on Nintendo for it despite them being in the right for taking down his Patreon. After that, he became increasingly hostile toward any fans asking about the series and chose to ignore them. This, in addition to offering no information on Episode 2 for years, his hypocritical attitude toward Nintendo since the Patreon takedown, his increasingly controversial statements on Twitter (the marriage statement and the Smash Bros Ultimate Peach rants in particular), and his seeming refusal to do anything about his depression in favor of playing video games, led to nearly his entire fanbase abandoning him, with him fading into obscurity by 2019.

Western Animation

• Poor Don Bluth. He began his career as an animator at Walt Disney Animation. Disgusted with the wretched state of the company after the death of Walt Disney, he and a group of other animators departed to form their own studio with the intent of creating quality animated films that celebrated the golden age of Disney animation. Throughout The Eighties, his studio became distinguished for its amazing films (like The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail), as well as the groundbreaking Dragon's Lair arcade game. Then The Eighties ended and Bluth fizzled out right after All Dogs Go to Heaven. He opened The Nineties with Rock-a-Doodle, a notorious flop, and then declared bankruptcy. His next three films were released by a distributor, and met with progressively worse results. He also had to compete both with himself, because he did not maintain sequel rights over his older works (such as The Land Before Time and An American Tail sequels), and with his old boss Disney, who had recovered its former glory and started an animation Renaissance (and ironically, many of the "new blood" of animators trained under Bluth had moved to Disney when Bluth moved his operations to Ireland). Roger Ebert's review of Rock-A-Doodle noted the irony. After a brief return to form with Anastasia (well, he made money anyway), he followed it up with the disastrous Titan A.E., which bankrupted Fox Animation (though it has been Vindicated by Cable). An attempt to revive Dragon's Lair also flopped. Bluth has never really recovered his success, though he occasionally surfaces to do small efforts and still has plans for a Dragon's Lair film.
• One of the most infamous, tragic, and maybe even somewhat bizzaro examples of this is Richard Williams. The Canadian-born animator is considered one of the most influential visionaries in his medium, and has done a lot of work such as the animation aspect of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The infamy however regards the film The Thief and the Cobbler, which Williams wanted to be his magnum opus. Completely grass roots financed, the film's production was started in 1964, and would go on to one of the longest productions times of any film in general in the history of contemporary media, since by the late 1980's...they still weren't finished! It was around that time that Warner Brothers approached him with the offer to fully finance the completion of the film. However, as the film was almost devoid of dialog, singing, and other such copycat desires Warner Brothers desired to have the film compete with The Little Mermaid, the deal fell through. The Completion Bond Company helped to finish the film, with distribution by Majestic Films. However, before completion, Williams was actually taken off the project and the film was re-edited with improvised voicing, additional animation to show this, song numbers, and a number of edits to the overall narrative of the story. After the film's initial release in Australia (where it flopped), Miramax decided to make their own version of the film and release it in the United States. The end result was a disaster. Not only was the film a financial bomb, which considering its limited release...could be seen as expected, but the film was critically panned as incoherent and horribly edited. The end of a movie that took a little over 20 years to make was a nonsensical flop. It shouldn't take much imagination to guess at just how that must have felt for Williams, as the disenfranchised animator has absolutely refused to even acknowledge the film's existence ever since then. One of the most diabolical examples of Executive Meddling in film today.
  • Later, a dedicated animation fan miraculously tracked down various pieces of the film; unfinished pencil tests, rough animation, and direct input from people who worked on the film. He then stitched all his findings together with bits of the theatrical release, took out the voices, and even put in bits of atmospheric music that was originally going to be scored for the film in order to make a massive fan-edit of the film to be as close to the original vision as possible: The Re-cobbled Cut. The results have been generally praised as a far superior movie, but sadly Williams himself still (allegedly) refuses to acknowledge the film.
• What about Ralph Bakshi? For a guy who hates Don Bluth's works they have a lot in common. Bakshi first made himself known with the Cult Classic film Fritz the Cat ten years before Bluth released The Secret of NIMH, and Bakshi's last film was made ten years before Titan A.E.. He made many underground, non-Disney films that were successful. Bakshi made it big with The Lord of the Rings and managed to stay under the radar. But after Fire and Ice, he all but disappeared, and then tried to make a comeback in 1992 but failed. The Last Day of Coney Island is STILL in Development Hell like that Dragon's Lair movie.
• John Kricfalusi was once regarded as influential in animation, with The Ren and Stimpy Show being his breakout work. Unfortunately, his ideas were often all too crazy for the execs to tolerate. He got fired from Nickelodeon because of his late work, and his show was handed to another studio only to crash after season 5. When he got the chance to do the show again, it was from Spike TV, whose executives asked for the content to be "more adult", so it could stand next to South Park or Family Guy. Despite good ratings and reception, it was cancelled after a month due to John K. managing to complete only 3 out of the 9 requested episodes on time. A few years after that, he began making posts on his blog, John K. Stuff, about his influences, as well as his studies on animation and tutorials for fans wanting to learn how to do animation. However, he doesn't have much of anything kind to say about modern animation or modern stuff in general, most of which is basically just him complaining about stuff he doesn't watch. Then, in March 2018, he was accused by former Spümcø employees, Katie Rice and Robyn Byrd, of sexually assulting them when they were underage, which eventually led to other former Spümcø employees coming out and telling their stories about all the times Kricfalusi had been downright hostile towards them if they didn't do something exactly the way he wanted. The final nail in the coffin, however, was the abysmal reception of his short film, Cans Without Labels, a Kickstarter project that was fully funded in 2012 and wasn't released until seven years later in 2019, with painfully obvious CGI objects clashing with the otherwise 2D animation, and some unfunny jokes, among many other problems. After all of that, his career in animation ended for good, and he lost the respect of everyone who used to look up to him.
• Earl Duvall was one of two directors - the other being Friz Freleng - that helped get the Warner Bros. cartoon studio back up and running after original directors Harman and Ising defected to MGM. He directed some pretty decent cartoons and was given the honor of directing the studio's first color cartoon. These days however, Freleng is widely regarded as one of the Godfathers of animation, while Duvall's name is just a footnote in animation history books, and the reason for this is that Duvall one day decided it'd be a great idea to get extremely drunk and demand that his pay packet be doubled. Needless to say, it wasn't - Duvall was instantly fired and never worked in the animation industry again.
• The directing team of Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale. After rising up the stratosphere with Beauty and the Beast, they seemed to lose their footing after Atlantis: The Lost Empire was a critical and box office disappointment. Since then, Wise's only directing credit was the English dub of Spirited Away while Trousdale has been reduced to directing television specials for DreamWorks.
• Richard Rich falls into this one completely. He started off as a director for Disney, and then he left to make his own animated features. They had three things in common: mistaken for Disney films mediocre reviews, and miserable box office takes. Since then, his most recent work is a producer for CG animated features.
• Skyler Page, creator of Clarence, was fired from his own show by Cartoon Network Studios in July 2014 for allegations of sexual assault.
• Chris Savino, creator of The Loud House, was suspended, and then fired from the show by Nickelodeon in October 2017 following reports of his sexual advancements and threats of blacklisting to his co-workers.

Inventors

• While firearms enthusiasts may be fond of the 10/22 rifle, Ruger 22 pistol series and Mini-14 rifle their creator, Bill Ruger, is completely and utterly despised for his support of gun control. Even his own company wasn't terribly fond of Bill Ruger's politics, and Ruger started producing the larger capacity magazines and AR-15 variants he opposed 2 years after his death (and likely would have done so sooner had the Assault Weapons Ban not been in force those 2 years).

Fictional Examples

Video Games

• Manhunt: Lionel Starkweather was once a famous movie director, and his movies were considered to be decent. But eventually his career came to an end, because what goes up must come down. This would make him sympathetic...but then he started making snuff movies, and got his revenge on the people responsible for the death of his career by making them STAR in those snuff films.