Good media that should never have been made

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Basically write whatever movies/shows/games/books that you consider worth experiencing but directly resulted in terrible trends that offset whatever good came from the original work.

I'd start with Inception (the film) for adding the Bwooong sound effect for every trailer for multiple years afterwards.
Video game wise, Braid was one of the earliest indie darlings that popularized terrible overused trope subversions (ie, the player is the real villain), and became the entry point for video game as art disphits that make zero effort platformers.

 

[BlueSpark]

The first Half-Life for teaching developers that having tedious, unskippable cutscenes is fine so long as they're in real-time and the player is in control of their character in them.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

In that case, Undertale.
Game seems good (different way to doing a RPG imo) but spawned a horrible fandom. Not directly related to the game, but i'm sure that created a lot of hate for the game only by the fans.

 

[Ruin]

The Abrahams Star Trek remakes ruined Sci Fi films for like ten years. You couldn't watch any of them without the most overdone lense flare effect ever taking up 1/3 of the screen.

Inception for making it trendy to introduce tons of meaningless confusing technobabble that adds nothing to the plot.

"Humans are the real monsters" is a 2 deep 4 u plot cliché that pre dates the show but The Walking Dead really saturated it into the mainstream.

Seinfeld is a good show but I'm firmly convinced it's popularity led to the laugh track after every word being in fucking everything.

The Sixth Sense for making the ironic twist ending a thing. That shit ruined movies for like fifteen years at least.

 

[Lone MacReady]

Assassin's Creed 1+2, while interesting and used to show off some cool historical locales, shat things up by popularizing shallow "open world" collect-a-thons. It was fine for the time, but a decade later when I'm playing the newest Zelda game - and the first thing you do is climb a fucking tower just to unlock more of the map... yeah shit is very tiresome now.

 

[The Real Me]

Family Guy, the original seasons are fantastic and even now, there's the occasional surprisingly good episode but goddamn. In the past couple of years, mature animation has only just started to crawl out of the sea of Family Guy clones.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

In that case, Undertale.
Game seems good (different way to doing a RPG imo) but spawned a horrible fandom. Not directly related to the game, but i'm sure that created a lot of hate for the game only by the fans.

I don't know if an obnoxious fandom can be attributed to Undertale. Probably Star Trek started this trend.
But I'll double down and go with Earthbound. Yeah it's an old school darling, but goddamn the quirky RPG is an insufferable genre.

 

[Just A Butt]

every fandom is cancer

every
single
one

 

[Kosher Dill]

But I'll double down and go with Earthbound.

You beat me to it. Any time you see Earthbound-style art that's a flashing warning sign: HERE BE TROONS.

I'll add in the one-two punch of the "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" movies, for introducing the idea that you can and should try to turn movies into multipart epics (or worse, "cinematic universes").

 

[L50LasPak]

Undertale definitely made having a large Tumblrite fandom acceptable in the eyes of the general public.

 

[Idiotron]

The Matrix
Good movie, very stylish, every shot is like a painting, tells a complete story, that's it.
But then, it became the highest grossing R rated movie of all time and not only did it spawn shitty sequels and video games, it created a trend of every action hero becoming a cartoon.
Think about it:
There are no realistic action heroes anymore.
In the 1st Dirty Harry, Eastwood ends up in the hospital because the villain kicks him like 10 times in the ribs.
Can you imagine something like that now?
And sure, we had the 80's bodybuilder action stars but that lasted like 10 years before people like Willis and Reeves took over.
We're 23 years post-Matrix and still, everybody does kung fu and takes hits to the face that would send a grizzly bear to the shadow realm, it got to the point where it's hard to get excited during an action scene because you genuinely don't know what can hurt which character.
Even Matrix had rules, most action movies today, don't, it's whatever the writer needs to happen to move the plot along.

Pulp Fiction
Great movie, deserves the praise.
However, it changed the way dialogue is written for the worse.
A lot of the current pop culture reference based writing started with this shit.
People blame Family Guy or Shrek but this came before and the whole 2nd part of the 90's was full of: "Remember that movie from 1958? Did you know that it's actually about anal sex?"
Not to mention the pretentious pseudophilosophy that characters started to spew in movies.
It also fucked Tarantino's career in a way because Jackie Brown clearly indicated that he was moving in another direction but it bombed so since then, every movie of his is Pulp Fiction.

Star Wars
It was the start of the downfall.
Since this movie, everything started being consoomer driven.
Everything has to have a toyline and a clothing line.
And what about nostalgia?
This was the start.
Even though it didn't directly used any IPs, it invoked everything nostalgic from past decades, as far as doing basically space World War II right after the Vietnam War to remind Americans of a time when they were the good guys.
Right after it was a hit, you suddenly had them making Flash Gordon which, while entertaining, is objectively a horrible movie.
The first few major remakes like The Thing, The Fly and The Blob were good but ever since then, what has actually improved upon the original?
45 years post-Star Wars and all major movies are nostalgia filled cinematic fast food designed to advertise products, sell you merch, advertise other movies and relying on you seeing movies from the past by using soulless recreations of iconic moments and imagery.
If George was given full creative control and had Luke with a robot head and shit like that like he originally wanted, that movie would have bombed and cinema would maybe be in a better place now.

That's what I've got for now.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

Going to be sacrilegious here and say the Sonic franchise. Good 2D platformers, but SEGA didn't know what the fuck to do with him past those. From 3D platformers that were decent at best, to the stupefying lows of Shadow the Hedgehog , Sonic '06 and Forces. And because they rely on him as a crutch, SEGA just won't let the poor fucker die already.

 

[The Real Me]

Going to be sacrilegious here and say the Sonic franchise. Good 2D platformers, but SEGA didn't know what the fuck to do with him past those. From 3D platformers that were decent at best, to the stupefying lows of Shadow the Hedgehog , Sonic '06 and Forces. And because they rely on him as a crutch, SEGA just won't let the poor fucker die already.

What's your opinion on Sonic Frontiers? I mean, let's be honest. You look at the announcement trailer and can't think of anything but the "Nintendo, hire this man" meme. However, being open-world will hopefully result in a return to momentum-based gameplay, as opposed to all of the boost-heavy corridors that've been commonplace since Unleashed. Personally, I can enjoy that style of gameplay but it has gotten so stagnant.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

What's your opinion on Sonic Frontiers? I mean, let's be honest. You look at the announcement trailer and can't think of anything but the "Nintendo, hire this man" meme. However, being open-world will hopefully result in a return to momentum-based gameplay, as opposed to all of the boost-heavy corridors that've been commonplace since Unleashed. Personally, I can enjoy that style of gameplay but it has gotten so stagnant.

It's been almost half a year since it was first revealed in full, and there's still no gameplay footage. Hint: same thing happened with Forces. To say that red flags are out and my expectations are rock-bottom would be an understatement. And then there's this:

"WE REALLY LEARNED FROM OUR MISTAKES THIS TIME GUYS, WE SWEAR!"

Show. Us. Gameplay. Then. Your. Game. Is. Supposed. To. Come. Out. This. Fucking. Year.

 

[Thiletonomics]

The original Battle Royale novel from Japan, as well as the well-known movie, and manga versions of it, would end up leading to the battle royale game trend, that game companies tried to chase after to make the big bucks. And while there were some major wins in the BR genre, i.e. PUBG and Fortnite (despite the bad rap the latter gets), it did also lead to some major duds, like The Culling 2, Radical Heights, and Realm Royale, and Battlefield 2042 ended up getting fucked over by that too, given that it was speculated that it was originally going to be developed as a BR game. And that was also after Battlefield V's take on a battle royale, Firestorm, failed to attract players to play it.

Battle Royale did also inspire the creation of works such as The Hunger Games series, the Danganronpa games, and Squid Game. And given how fucked up parts of the DR fandom are...

And as for BR itself, it did have that sequel movie that absolutely sucked, but I guess the sequel being bad was a good thing, in that the franchise wasn't milked any further than it did.

Also, in a smaller extent, Idol Anime, i.e. Love Live! and THE iDOLM@STER, combine two fandoms that already have degenerate behavior, anime and music fan groups (i.e. American boy bands, K-POP, and J-POP groups), and multiply the toxicity of them. And my condolences go out to Berserk fans, since Miura was distracted by iM@S, to the point that he was unable to finish his work on Berserk before he left this world too soon.

 

[TinCan Wizard]

Superhero movies. It opened the door for the cinematic universe cancer that plagues media today, not to mention the godawful Whedon style of writing ''Dude we are fighting robots, ISN'T THAT WEIRD HAHA''. The ''Dark Universe'' is a good example of this. I laughed out loud when they made Mr Hyde into Nick Fury, running his own SHIELD knockoff.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

The ''Dark Universe'' is a good example of this.

The screamingly silent plane crash will never not make me piss myself with laughter:

 

[Jesus Goldstein]

It may be a stretch, but I think 28 Days Later was the predecessor to all modern zombie apocalypse media, for good or ill.

Edit: just checked Wikipedia and apparently my idea is not original.

 

[Oats12345]

Superhero movies. It opened the door for the cinematic universe cancer that plagues media today, not to mention the godawful Whedon style of writing ''Dude we are fighting robots, ISN'T THAT WEIRD HAHA''. The ''Dark Universe'' is a good example of this. I laughed out loud when they made Mr Hyde into Nick Fury, running his own SHIELD knockoff.

All the good stuff Whedon made ended up ruining entertainment dialogue. Makes me hate him even more

 

[The Nothingness]

Superhero movies. It opened the door for the cinematic universe cancer that plagues media today, not to mention the godawful Whedon style of writing ''Dude we are fighting robots, ISN'T THAT WEIRD HAHA''. The ''Dark Universe'' is a good example of this. I laughed out loud when they made Mr Hyde into Nick Fury, running his own SHIELD knockoff.

To piggyback off that, I'll say having that post-credit scene in Iron Man was the Pandora's box that led to cinematic universes.