Pet Character Syndrome Vs Hated Character Syndrome

I’ve referred to “Pet Character Syndrome” a time or two on this site. A “pet character” is one so beloved by the writer (whether they created that character or not) that they refuse to believe nobody else does either. Pet Character Syndrome is the result. It leads to the pet character being a Mary Sue/Gary Stu if they’re ever challenged by anything at all. It goes beyond simple “plot armor” and results in the exact opposite of the intent, leading to a strong dislike of the character, even people liked him or her. Think Dave Filoni and his surrogate “daughter”, Asoka Tano, or how I always complain about Simon Furman’s treatment of Grimlock in his Transformers stories.

Hated Character Syndrome is thus the complete opposite. A “hated character” is one so despised by the writer (usually a character they didn’t create) that they refuse to believe everybody else doesn’t, either. Hated Character Syndrome is then the result. It leads to the hated character being treated in the worst possible sense, made the villain or the most annoying character to the point where you ask why they’re there…except it’s because the character DOES have fans. Think Mary Jane Watson, Simon Furman’s treatment of Prowl, and a bunch of others we’ll be talking about in this article.

Now sometimes they are right and at least a strong enough voice comes up in opposition. Scrappy-Doo and the original Snarf come to mind. On the other hand they also have fans like myself. Jar-Jar Binks is an odd one as he has fans and haters in seemingly equal measure, while nobody is celebrating Rey Palpatine outside of brand loyalists and the politically “correct”. It’s always easy to tell when a character is a pet or hated because the writer will absolutely let you know it. It’s why I can’t stand Wolverine, because too many writers insist that the savage version is the best character ever and refuses to let him find happiness and relax. That’s actually a pet “version” of a character, which is just digging too deep for this discussion. Let’s focus on the pets versus the hated.

Of course this topic came to me after all the discourse over not just the defense but HOW Tom Brevoort defended the continued retconning of the Spider-Marriage after the reception the new version of Ultimate Spider-Man has gotten for using the active marriage in its continuity. Where the original series was about going back to basics and re-imagining Peter Parker’s corner of the world, the new series goes the other direction, allowing Peter to age and have a family with the woman fans insist he belongs back together with. The internet has already weighed in on that discussion so I don’t think I can add anything new to it. I also don’t for sure that the renewed marriage is boosting the sales, although it is one of the ways its promoted. Meanwhile in 616 there’s the fan hated character Paul being used to keep the Parkers from getting back together and undoing Mephisto’s nonsense, despite the constant teasing. If you’re going to leave her there, then stop doing this to the readers who want them back together.

Then again, what they did to Gwen Stacy in Sins Past was downright criminal.

The Spider-Writers’ hatred of MJ and the marriage goes back to the 1990s, despite the relationship going even further back. Originally it was supposed to be Gwen Stacey that Peter would get together with (and some writers are salty that it isn’t, hence characters like “Spider-Gwen”), with Mary Jane as a rival for dramatic tension. Maybe they wanted to turn Peter into Archie Andrews even that far back? This plan backfired as the readers gravitated towards Mary Jane as the character who could best fit into Peter’s world, and thus Gwen dies and MJ takes her place, having to go through a character arc involving the family being abandoned by her father and making peace with that event. Once she did, she was able to marry Peter, in a ceremony that included a real-world tribute, with Stan Lee himself officiating a “marriage” between two people dressed as Spider-Man and his bride to help promote it. That’s how big it was.

Unfortunately, the 1990s brought in writers who insisted we couldn’t relate to a Peter Parker that was happily married and wasn’t a total loser, telling me what they think of their readers. They tried to send her off with a clone until the higher-ups saw dollar signs in the storyline and insisted they keep it going so long that fans rejected all of it, and the marriage was back. They even teased or outright attempted to kill her off in a plane explosion. A divorce wouldn’t work out of some belief that would “age the character” because these same writers today can’t stop putting Peter back in high school with his college supporting cast in every recent adaptation not made for kindergarteners. So they retconned it out after trying to make MJ look bad by arguing with Peter about his superhero life despite previous depictions of being more able to accept “Spider-Man” as part of their lives previously, the reason fans wanted her to be Mrs. Peter Parker.

They even made One More Day retroactively her fault, that she actually convinced Peter to go through with it to save Aunt May, a character who has three storylines: “I need money”, “I’m sick”, and the doting aunt. Sometimes all three. It’s been a race to make her as unlikable as possible because they don’t learn their lesson. Back when Peter was involved with Felicia “Black Cat” Hardy, writer Roger Stern hated her and didn’t want to write her. Fans of the character wanted more so he thought the way out was “if I make the character hateable enough to the readers they’ll happily let me send her off or bump her off”. This is not the response he got, as fans were instead upset that a character they really liked was acting out of character because one writer hated her fictional guts.

I mentioned Snarf and Scrappy-Doo earlier, and they are also victims of Hated Character Syndrome. People who hate Scrappy don’t realize that without him the Scooby-Doo franchise would have ended with The Scooby-Doo Show, as ABC believed they couldn’t take the concept any further. The first season of Scooby & Scrappy-Doo comes off more like The Scooby-Doo Show (my favorite of the Scooby series) with Scrappy shoved into it. Later seasons and a series of TV movies would find better ways to use Scooby’s nephew as they evolved the character, and kids still liked him. Today we have either the gang trying to distance themselves from or ignore/forget Scrappy or, in the case of James Gunn’s movie, turning him into the villain because those writers hate the character. The hate was so bad Cartoon Network created a flash game that was about throwing food at the poor little puppy. You know, a child dog.

pictured: a bad representation of what some people think Snarf is.

ThunderCats: Hammerhand’s Revenge was a miniseries set during the ThunderCats’ time on Third Earth. For reasons I can’t explain leaving Snarf at home in this story wasn’t an option. Snarf was dragged along like Scooby and Shaggy, and all he did was whine and complain like a coward. That was never Snarf, Lion-O’s former nursemaid turned squire, who served as a liaison with their allies on the planet, once saved the ThunderCats with the help of animal friends, and once beat Mumm-Ra by getting his own magic powers and getting the drop on them. In a proper battle, “Snarf-Ra” would have had his head handed to him but Mumm-Ra wasn’t ready for this new event and ran off. Instead of not using him, writer Fiona Avery opted to pour all her Snarf hatred into his depiction. As a fan of the original Snarf, who disliked the reimagined Snarf being a simple animal and ThunderCats Roar turning him into a “swiss army robot”, I hated this and said so in my reviews of the comic. Like with Black Cat, you cannot make me hate a character by writing them out of character. You simply make me not like you or your story for getting a character I like wrong. Again!

Back to Marvel, I still haven’t forgiven the Pet Avengers series for its treatment of Ms. Lion, the dog from Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends. Never a part of the comics, and therefore not an actual pet of any of the heroes like Lockjaw, Redwing, and the others (neither was frog Thor either, but that’s a different mistake), there was no reason to include her. There was even less reason to make her stupid and MALE! That’s before the whole rush to represent trans people, so they misgendered the dog they didn’t even have to use in a comic made for an audience too young to know who Ms. Lion is and proceeded to have no good reason to have the character there. What was the point? You can’t hate dogs. Lockjaw’s a dog. Let’s not even get started on what DC Comics did in recent years to Wendy & Marvin, the “junior Superfriends” who were replaced by the Wonder Twins on the cartoon… or what they did to the Wonder Twins.

If you hate a character, don’t write for the series that character is in, or let the character go to another comic. Not that this worked with MJ when they tried to shove her into Iron Man’s comic because despite hating her, Marvel can’t get away from her fans. Snarf doesn’t have to be in every mission, nor do you need to kill or evilize the three ThunderCats–Bengali, Lynx-O, and Pumyra–that came later. The reimagined series made her evil and WildStorm killed them off in their post-TV comics as part of every other horrible thing done to the characters in ThunderCats: The Return. All you’re doing is ticking off the characters fans so they know how much you hate that character, something that has only gotten worse with writers and directors who are in direct opposition to the fans and the source material, even when they’ve taken over the source material. Pet Character Syndrome makes for uninteresting characters while Hated Character Syndrome makes for ruining ones that have fans. It’s too sides of the same coin, and a coin better tossed out with the trash.