r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ultrimus-Prime • 1d ago

miscellaneous Media Made to Prove the Haters Wrong

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Tunak Tunak Tun (Daler Mehndi) Critics claimed his music videos were only popular because they featured attractive women dancing. Mehndi responded by making a music video featuring nobody except multiple green-screen versions of himself. It became a massive hit and his most famous song.

Five Nights at Freddy’s - Scott Cawthon previously made a family-friendly game called Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. Critics complained that the characters looked like creepy animatronics. Rather than abandon that visual style, Cawthon decided to turn them into an actual horror game using scary animatronics.

Superman Kingdom Come - Mark Waid and Alex Ross were reacting to the 1990s trend of increasingly violent, cynical superheroes.

Their story deliberately challenged the belief that traditional superheroes like Superman were outdated. It portrayed the consequences of abandoning heroic ideals and argued that compassion, restraint, and morality were still essential to superheroes.

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u/SatoruGojo232 1d ago edited 1d ago

Spider-Man being created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko despite Stan's publisher telling him that people hate spiders and nobody would care about a mainline teenager superhero with personal problems (since at that time most teens in superhero comics were sidekicks, and superheroes were mostly role models without flaws)

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u/FiaGiolla 1d ago

Iron Man is another case of this, Lee set out to take the most unlikable kind of person and make him likable

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u/wvj 1d ago

Just about all the boom of comics that brought them to their modern popularity was based on these humanizing stories over the more grandiose stuff.

Somewhat ironically, Stan kind of missed the mark when he got to the X-Men, and it wasn't until they got rebooted under Claremont that they got this kind of treatment. And it was (yet again) so wildly popular it basically spawned the Bronze Age & drove the next 20 years of comics, with everyone copying the X-Men as a model (notably, DC's Teen Titans reboot was explicitly for this purpose).

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u/rynshar 1d ago

And "Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos" was a bet to see if they could sell a comic with the worst name ever.