Misblamed

Fans sometimes blame the wrong people, and thus Misblame somebody. Comes in multiple varieties:

Type 1: There are actual weaknesses in the original work, which were faithfully translated in an adaptation.

For example, you see an anime or manga with great action sequences and an interesting premise, punctuated by bizarre changes by the translators that cheapen this premise, provide a jarring tone, or even make the plot nonsense. You assume it's fallen victim to a serious Macekre. So you import the DVD, maybe get a region 2 player if you live outside the region, and put it in... Surprise! It's not a Macekre after all; what you thought was caused by overzealous translators was just a weakness in the original work. And yet, the fans have Misblamed the translators, and they're not going to stop anytime soon.

It's less common for audiences nowadays who have access to the original material beforehand, if you know what I mean.

Type 2: Blaming the author or actor when the true cause was Executive Meddling.

Writers and those working the grind-mill of day-to-day creative production are just trying to do their best making a good show/movie/comic book. Unfortunately, the demands of the executives to try and make it more popular become a kink in the creative flow.

For example a new Story Arc emerges that turns the characters inside out and the fans respond with bile and hatred. Upon exiting that story arc everything returns to the status quo. Odds are, such major changes are demanded as a method to shake up the series and blindsides you because it was shoehorned into a narrative the writers already had planned out.

Type 3: Blaming Executive Meddling when the author did it on purpose, without any executive mandate, perhaps with good cause, perhaps with poor cause.

The mere existence of meddling executives often gives the impression that they are tyrants, slave driving the humble writer. But even the glorified writers are prone to mistakes and their own issues, which is chronicled with Author Tract, Author Appeal, Creator Breakdown and other tropes.

For example your favorite character is subject to Flanderization and you assume that the executives demanded the supposedly "flatter" personality. But the writer's blog reveals that the change was made because it made writing for the character easier and allowed for more story possibilities.

Type 4: The ultimate difficulties of the Fan Dumb, laying down false information and establishing opinion as fact. The information is then spread across the internet at the speed of gossip (the only thing in the universe thus far proven to be faster than light itself) and only information from the source can correct it.

This is an example of when the Fan Dumb just Did Not Do the Research. They blame someone who worked on it for an error when they actually didn't even do that much behind it. A very common form of this is when people blame a company that worked on something that was subject to Hype Backlash, when in reality, the blamed company was merely a financial backer or they didn't have any involvement whatsoever and merely published it.

This is often the underlying cause behind all the other types, and we here are All The Tropes are not immune to it either.

Another small case that might be considered "Type 4.5" are mistranslations. Some fans might accidentally translate something the wrong way and accept it as fact. This may also be the result of rumours.

Type 5: The "Single Person" Fallacy, that somehow one individual is responsible for the totality of a problem or mistake that cripples a production. Or the entire production as a whole. A common name for this particular fallacy variant is the "Quarterback Syndrome", so called due to the tendency to blame the quarterback for bad plays in a game of American football.

Take any given movie or television series. There happens to be an episode or scene that is just bad. The costuming is ridiculous, the acting is stiff, the dialogue is cliché, the direction is uninspired and even the lighting looks bad. Yet why is the director/showrunner blamed for it all? Well, each of those things listed are handled by a whole individual team who specialize in that field. The director has a lot of control, but if one of those elements goes sour it isn't just the director/showrunner's fault, and sometimes the director/showrunner is unable to do anything about it due to Executive Meddling, time/budget constraints, or some other impairment.

A similar fallacy that applies to Video Games is the "There are no Developers, only Publishers" Fallacy. Despite all the company logos that show when people load up a game, they only seem to see the one of the big company and tend to assume it was all their doing. Even when their input is limited to monetary support and maybe localization. To further confound this, sometimes the #1 targets for this fallacy (Nintendo, Square Enix, EA Games, Ubisoft, Activision) are companies that actually do develop and publish games. There are some rumours that Japanese developers are actually glad in knowing they'll receive no credit for their work; because they'll also receive none of the criticism.

This is often a result of a phenomenon called "Credits Negligence". Admit it - you yourself don't watch most credits in movies, shows, games, etc. Unless that is, they do stuff like add in animation sequences, bloopers, small epilogues, or there's something else at the end. And even then...it's not likely you paid attention to them. Sometimes, they even scroll too fast for you to read them exactly. (This happens on Television shows a lot, because they have to fit it all within a timeslot, so many times they only show the major credits and omit a lot) But nevertheless, you sometimes would actually be quite surprised at what one person's role really was in the work if you took the time to read the credits. Most haters typically won't do this, especially for games. (This leads to why the "Single Person" Fallacy is often accepted as "Fact" and "creditable".)

All of that said, many would say that blaming the director for an artistic demerit in a film is completely justified. After all, the director's job is overseeing all artistic decisions, so if he or she lets another person's mistake slip by unchecked, there is some culpability. Hence the popular industry ideology, "When you're the director, everything is your fault." (This is pretty much the same phenomenon wherein the director is also credited for every good thing as well.) The problem in these cases is when people fail to acknowledge that the director isn't the only one to blame.

Even we are susceptible to this. Both in this page and other pages on the wiki, you will see us blame a mysterious "executive" for all of a show's problems.

Compare Beam Me Up, Scotty for misquotes. Compare and contrast Creator Worship, Creator Backlash, The Scapegoat and Scapegoat Creator. See also God Never Said That, for a specific species of Type 4. Compare Media Research Failure for when it is done in the media.

Examples of Misblamed include:

General

• There is a tendency of fans for canceled/discontinued works to blame everybody involved in the distribution of bad faith without thinking that there might have been valid reasons. The simple reality is most shows weren't Screwed by the Network, but simply just didn't get either the ratings or the advertising revenue to warrant their cost. Distribution companies don't stay afloat by losing money to appeal to niches, after all. See also Fan Myopia and The Firefly Effect (which is almost a form of Fan Myopia in itself).
  • Also in regards to the Too Good to Last shows is that no one understands how good it is until much later, which means a too-long delayed Fridge Brilliance can hurt a show without any single person or group being at fault.
    • There's also the fact that they can often seem so good because they didn't have time for other tropes such as Seasonal Rot to set in.
  • Medium issues may also apply in some cases. An anime series without substantial backing isn't going to exceed 12 or 26 episodes (half or a whole television season), and a Western cartoon show will more than likely not exceed 65 (a 13-week syndication cycle).
  • Note that most shows get their income from advertising, so the key is not high ratings, but reaching the audience that advertisers are interested in. The most sought-after market is young males with high disposable incomes, so shows with high ratings can get cancelled if most of the audience is middle-aged working class females. This can cause fans to assume all kinds of conspiracies if their show of choice got cancelled despite high ratings.
• On the flip side to the above, many can assume that a show was canceled because it was horrible and only horrible at that. While true for some, it's not always the case for other titles. It might have not been promoted well, it was in an unfavorable time slot or even channel, or maybe it was, yes, Screwed by the Network.
• Follow the Leader can all too often lead to this, sure there is such a thing as Rip-Offs of course but you can be surprised how often these claims can be baseless. Many popular franchises that receive "imitations" were quite often not all that original to begin. (Namely on how the really popular franchises more often popularize tropes than create them.) There have been plenty of times in which the similarities in "Ripoffs" to more "popular franchises" can be overly vague at best. (Such as when characters from one franchise look rather similar to someone from a more popular franchise but their backstories are pretty much different.) There are a pretty good number of so-called "ripoffs" in which the only thing they really have in common with the more popular franchise is that they are in the same genre. There have been certain cases in which even the company behind a certain popular franchise thinks so and tries to file a lawsuit against the "rip-off" and loses in the process.
  • It is also quite common for a set of circumstances to influence more than one person, so you can get a sudden glut of 'x' movies without any of them being rip offs or originals.
• It usually takes a lot of people to make a movie/game/series/whatever. We as consumers and viewers usually do not know exactly what goes on while they're making what we're experiencing right now. On top of the fact that not all of us will see the credits, the credits may not show who did what or even leave out someone who was working on it altogether. (This often happens with voice actors.) Even then, the credits won't tell us who exactly did what, for all we know, an important decision wasn't thought up by the person we're blaming.
• Often happens with actors in media with significant Hate Dumbs. The actors/actresses will be treated like they are the worst actors ever for taking that part, despite the fact that most of them are at worst mediocre actors who are trying to work with what was written for them. For example, most Disney Channel stars, or the stars of Twilight.

Anime and Manga

• Generally speaking, the lengthy amount of time between Japanese and US/EU DVD/Blu-Ray releases of anime, and/or releases lacking in quality, are blamed on the alleged incompetence of Western licensing companies and frequently held up as an excuse to pirate and/or not buy official DVDs. In truth, problems like these are often the responsibility of the Japanese companies licensing their properties in the first place, and arise from those companies' desire to prevent reverse importing (Japanese fans buying foreign DVDs because they're so much cheaper than domestic ones).
• Virtually any reference to American (or Western in general) pop culture is generally reviled as a lame joke added by dubbers or a mere coincidence. One example is when Tom Hanks and Mariah Carey are brought up in an episode of Wedding Peach, or when Sailor Moon made a Michael Jackson joke; all are in the original Japanese.
  • In fact, many more Western references made in Sailor Moon were removed from the English dub, such as Mars being a fan of Michael Jackson, or a Princess Diana Expy that appeared in the show.
  • There are more misblamings in Sailor Moon. The fifth season was not dubbed due to Toei not wanting to sell the rights, not because of the Starlights. (Granted, the possible controversy regarding the Starlights may have been a reason Toei chose not to sell, given the massive Bowdlerization of Haruka and Michuru...)
  • The live action/animation blend pilot is nicknamed "Saban Moon", after the company that brought Super Sentai to America as Power Rangers. However, Saban actually had nothing to do with this one; it was made by a company called Toon Makers.
  • Dic and Cloverway are often blamed for the dubbing of Sailor Moon when in fact Optimum Productions is responsible for most of how the dub turned out.
  • There's also a lot of people who don't seem to realize that some of these western references put into animes that weren't there in the first place where actually replacing a reference that wouldn't make sense elsewhere, and that sometimes, name changes aren't as bowlderized as you may think. There's the "Castle in the Sky" example listed on this page, and other examples such as Chi-Chi being changed in Latin America and Portuguese-speaking countries. No, this was done because "Chi-Chi" is regional slang for "Breasts" and "Urine" in Portuguese. Would you REALLY think it's a good idea to have a character named "Breasts" or "Urine" in a show meant for children and teenagers? Especially if it's meant to be taken seriously?
    • Whether Chi-Chi counts is debatable. It's also slang for "breasts" in Japanese, so it certainly got used in a childrens' show in Japan and would have been a Lucky Translation if it had been kept.
• More than one shojo fan has accused the genre of sticking to the cliché of "I love you, you love me, let's not say it 'till book three", not knowing that in Japan people just aren't as direct when it comes to emotions. It's not a cliché, it's a genuine cultural difference.
• Many fans believe the English versions for the Inuyasha songs are produced by the English dubbers. They are really made by the Italian dub, sung by Italians, and have only aired in Italy. The English dub uses the original Japanese songs for the endings, and does not use the openings.
• In general, filler is often a result of when an anime runs out of source material, and because it was aired in Japan, they have to do something. Not every fan knows that an anime series has to produce something during the dead-time for the manga to catch-up to the anime; one simply couldn't just put the show on a seasonal Hiatus because viewers would assume it was canceled and lose interest. So naturally, the writers of the anime may come up with filler. It's not uncommon to hear writers of the Manga get blamed for unpopular Filler Arcs or Filler Episodes that they had no hand in writing. Other options are to split the anime into an Alternate Continuity, in which writers may often be credited or blamed for that too.
• In Digimon, dubbers were blamed for things they didn't do. Before the advent of widespread fansubbing, when the details of the original were only known to a few, a lot of blatant lies were taken as absolute fact.
  • TK and Kari's famous kiss in the "Digimon World Tour" arc never happened. TK and Tai do kiss a French girl named Catherine on the cheeks, however.
    • There was also the persistent rumor that the English dubbers removed both a TK/Kari kiss that was supposedly in episode 13 and that both supposedly did end up married in the Distant Finale. Neither the kiss nor the marriage happened, of course, but the blame-inducing damage was done.
  • The same goes for Matt and Sora being divorced post-series. A statement by one of the script translators that this absolutely did not happen hasn't stopped the Tai/Sora shippers from insisting it did.
  • Wormmon did not gain an Armor form near the end of season two. The Japanese episode title "The Last Armor Evolution" refers to the show's last use of the gimmick, not a specific user. Wormmon only Armor-evolves in an audio drama.
  • There was a lot of humor that poked fun and lampshaded Davis' arrogant and ignorant characteristics in the dub. Some interpreted this as an insult and assumed the the Japanese version of Davis was much different. This was categorically denied by the production; turns out it was a well-intentioned running gag that people took too seriously.
    • To add on to this: a lot of the instances where Davis is being an idiot, inconsiderate or generally acting like a jerk, are almost the same in the original Japanese version. The only difference is that in the English version most of these instances are lampshaded by the other characters, and because this occurs quite often it ends up looking like the writers had something against Davis when in reality they were just translating his dialogue. However, many fans swore that the Japanese version Davis was different (read: smarter) despite having never seen the original version of 02.
      • One example of "Davis-is-an-idiot" joke had Kari show him her day planner, and Davis mistakes the date (8/1) for a fraction, and everyone laughs. This joke is almost exactly the same in both versions.
  • This got so bad that on the then-famous Digimon Couples forum, a long list of obviously fake Censored Dub Evidence was posted for Sora and Cody. At least, one hopes they meant it as a joke. Then again, this is Digimon, where every single character is a Launcher of a Thousand Ships...
  • Takato Matsuki and Ms. Asaji were different in the original version (Matsuda and Asanuma) but the fault was a misspelled script and not a deliberate change. And again, the difference between Matsuda and Matsuki is hardly world-shaking.
• Oh my God, look at what Light says in Death Note! He says, "I'll take a Potato chip, and EAT it!" Death Note is Ruined FOREVER! Look at what they added! ...added what? That scene is pretty much exactly the same as the anime, and the subtitles even say "I'll take a potato chip" (pause) "And eat it" while the so-called dramatic music that people claim was added plays. And in fact, it's even the same in the manga! Sans the dramatic music and the epic chip-split-in-half.
• There's a conspiracy theory in the Pokémon fandom that all PokéShipping is a product of 4Kids. Actually, the dub took out as much as was put back in, with the added reminder that as a low-age end shounen series, it never had huge romantic overtones anyway. A rumored scene in Misty's departure episode that showed Ash giving his cap to Misty was never in the original to begin with.
  • Some Pokémon fans go further, and blame 4Kids for everything that's wrong with the dub, including the many name changes that are actually the fault of Nintendo of America, even those "changes" that were just faulty translations to begin with.
  • 4Kids is often blamed for 'removing' the backstory of Mewtwo in Mewtwo Strikes Back, where Ai teaches Mewtwo about life, for being too sad. However, that scene was purely DVD only, for both America and Japan.
  • An interview revealed that the series becoming more culturally generic after the first saga was a decision made solely by the Japanese creators, who were very much aware that they had a worldwide franchise on their hands. It was not forced upon them by 4Kids as one faction had been insisting for years.
  • In the first episode that introduces Crasher Wake, the character of the day looks different from his Japanese look. People thought it was Pokémon USA, but it turns out it was the Japanese who changed it because he was based of the protagonist of 'Dokonjou Gaeru'. The creators of 'Dokonjou Gaeru' threatened to sue, so they changed him.
• There was a conspiracy theory around the Bleach dub, which had shown Yammy only knocking Chad down. Meanwhile, the manga had shown that Yammy had apparently ripped Chad's arm apart. (This was actually shown even in the issue of Shonen Jump which was subject to any kind of censorship.) The conspiracy theory was that they censored it for the dub...when it was actually done in the anime.
• It was widely believed that Keyop in Battle of the Planets (which really was Macekred, but in other ways) had his strange speech pattern because swearing was censored out in the original Gatchaman, though this belief has pretty much ended now that unedited dub Gatchaman by ADV Films is commercially available and can be compared.
• Most complaints about Naruto's English voice being "so annoying" ignore the character is a Bratty Half-Pint and state that it just doesn't show up as much when listening to his voice in another language. Instead of sounding like he has a sore throat in English...he sounds like he has a perma-screech in Japanese.
  • In fact, let's just throw in any example of an English dub voice that is called "annoying" despite the fact that it's supposed to be annoying and the Japanese voice was played in an equally irritating way...But It's not in a dub, and that's alright.
    • You wanna know one funny thing in the eternal subbing and dubbing wars? Well voice actors often get blamed for how a character is written.
  • Another common complaint is that the dub replaced a swastika on Neji's head with an X. Except the anime did that originally.
  • The dub even got blamed for some art changes made for the Japanese DVDs!
• Among many things they do deserve to be blamed for, 4Kids is sometimes bashed for not dubbing the "first season" of Yu-Gi-Oh! (which covered the earlier chapters of the manga). Except that the "first season" was a different series, made by a different animation company, with sometimes drastically different character designs, and not part of the same continuity as the second.
  • Speaking of, considering all of the wacky things that Konami and Upper Deck Entertainment has done to the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, it's hard for fans to keep track of who did what, and will often misblame one company for a screw-up that the other did.
  • Remember that scene where Jonouchi/Joey punches Honda/Tristan in Duelist Kingdom, and how it was removed (or as LittleKuriboh put it "It is implied dat I am punching you"?) Well, it's your imagination because the scene is not there in the original either. (Joey punching Yami Yugi was cut, though.)
    • 4Kids were also blamed with making up "the heart of cards", which was in the original, albeit not to the extent as in the dub, and a bit different in concept.
    • They also get blamed a lot for making up the concept of the "Shadow Realm" from whole cloth. They didn't; it exists in the original, inasmuch as the dark bubble dimension the characters slip into during a Shadow Game is the "Shadow Realm", it's just that the dub added a bunch of occasions where just dying was changed to getting sent there.
    • 4Kids is often blamed for turning Anzu/Tea into a "friendship nut", citing the speech she gives before Yugi and Kaiba's first duel as if 4Kids had created the whole scene themselves out of thin air. The speech in question and Anzu's tendencies were, again, almost utterly unchanged, being slightly exaggerated at most.
    • You want to talk about getting blamed for stuff that wasn't their fault? Their page on this wiki reminds people that they weren't the ones responsible for Macekreing Cardcaptor Sakura: Nelvana was. Yes, their reputation for screwing things up is so bad that they get blamed for bad dubs they didn't even do.
    • Similarly, the original TV dub of Escaflowne, produced by Ocean Studios and with changes ordered by Fox, was at one point attributed to 4Kids on this wiki.
    • As was Digimon. You'd think the group of voice actors (literally coming from the other side of country) used would be a strong hint.
  • On the 5D's side of things, head writer Shin Yoshida is widely blamed for the second season being weaker than the first, when in truth many of the plot details fans didn't like are believed to have been enforced by the Konami executives to better sell cards. Some fans know this and bash Yoshida anyway for giving in to the execs' demands to change the plot.
• Speaking of Cardcaptor Sakura, Nelvana is often itself misblamed for the terrible new theme, the skipping and reordering of episodes and eventual cancellation the show received when it aired on Kids WB in the United States. In all other English-speaking territories, all 70 episodes were aired in the correct order, non-spliced and with dubbed versions of the original themes. As Kids WB was known for editing other shows as well, it's odd Nelvana was blamed for this particular one.
• A large quantity of the complaints about the Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome mangas stem from not being faithful to the "original anime", despite the fact that the production teams were each given settings and characters whose traits they would establish themselves, and were made at the same time. This means that neither was an adaptation of either.
• Viz Media was blamed for the horrific dub of Eyeshield 21 when the blame actually goes to The Eyeshield 21 US Project, a group of Japanese companies who took a bunch of episodes of Eyeshield 21 and merged them into five episodes for a test run. It's unknown if the actual release will be as badly cut, nor whether they'll tone down the less "family-friendly" elements.
  • And while we're on the topic, while Hiruma's... distinctive speech pattern is heard clearly in the Jump Festa OVA, it is not heard in the actual TV series.
• Many yaoi-shippers have claimed that the US dub of Gundam Wing edited out "definitive proof" that the five Gundam pilots are gay, up to and including a wedding for one of the most shipped pairings and a sex scene for another. As the show is easily available unedited, this information can be proved false by simply watching the show and not the fantasy version cooked up by the Het Is Ew crowd.
  • In another case, certain fans often badmouth Mark Hildreth for portraying Heero as robotic rather than subdued; at conventions, Hildreth has said this was the decision of the voice director, not him (see below). Reportedly, the constant pestering got to him so much that he's sworn to never work on a Gundam dub again.
• In a variation, Christopher Sabat, a regular voice director for FUNimation and frequent voice actor, was often leveled criticism for the heavy dialogue alterations for Dragon Ball Z from the third season on. He pointed out that it wasn't his department, the script writing was out of his hands and his job was to do the best he could with the performance. To Funimation's credit, though, they took the time to make both acceptable to fans.
• Some other things Funimation has been misblamed for:
  • In yet another dubbing-related example, Funimation is frequently blamed for the changing of characters' names and the title of the American dub and English manga^[1] of Detective Conan, which was called "Case Closed". The name changes were actually requested by the Japanese licensor Tokyo Movie Shinsha, while the title change was the result of a complaint by one of the owners to the rights of Conan the Barbarian.
  • They were also blamed for changing Kimi ga Nozomu Eien to Rumbling Hearts. As it turns out, the decision to use it as the English-language title was made by the Japanese licensor (it was the subtitle of one of the PS2 ports, as well as the title of the main opening theme for incarnations of the original game), not Funimation.
  • The English Market-Based Title of Soukou no Strain, "STRAIN: Strategic Armoured Infantry", has been criticized for misrepresenting the series as battle-oriented (when some episodes don't even feature any fighting) and doing a bad job describing the role of the main characters. Actually, "STRategic Armoured INfantry" has been the official full name for the Strain units piloted by the Spatial Armour Division ever since the series first came out, and if you notice, the original title is also named after the mecha!
• Funimation gets blamed even before they release shows. In the later installments of Spice and Wolf, some Fan Sub groups have been accused of "using Funimation's translation" in spelling the female lead's name as "Holo" rather than "Horo." Once again, "Holo" is the official spelling according to the Japanese companies and the in-show visuals (as seen in episode 6 of the 2nd season).
  • There's actually a problem with this one, since the original light novels' author uses "Horo", in direct contradiction to what the official Japanese sources gave to Funimation.
• Similarly, when Dragon Ball Z Kai was licensed, Funimation got some flame for "changing" the original title (with the addition of... that... one letter). In reality Toei chose that name for international distribution. Pretty much every country not-Japan got the series with that name.
• The old Sonic the Hedgehog anime OAV, which was made sometime after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, refers to Knuckles the Echidna (introduced in that game) as a mole. This was preserved for the dub, where it is often misinterpreted as a translation error.
• This applies whenever a voice actor is criticized for "not sounding enough like the Japanese voice" or something to that effect. In reality, besides that being a dubious assessment of voice acting quality, it's not the voice actor who has the ultimate say on how a line is interpreted and delivered, but rather the voice director.
  • Bizarrely enough, people also complained about Yuki's voice actress (Michelle Ruff) in the English dub of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya sounding too much like the original Japanese.
    • Rather famously, one anime fan complained - to Johnny Yong Bosch's face - that his Ichigo voice didn't sound enough like Masakazu Morita's. Bosch's response was "I'm an actor, not an imitator."
      • Similarly, at a recent convention, Vic Mignogna took five minutes out of a panel to give an unsolicited semi-rant about how a voice actor's job is to act, not to do impressions.
• Parodied in Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei: An episode begins with the main cast watching a bad movie, whose director defends it by saying that it was 100% faithful to the source material and it's not his fault the original story sucked. The rest of the episode consists of other people making similar excuses, such as a housewife blaming her recipes on the soup her husband didn't like.
• Anybody who ever shows you a Fan Sub and then tells you "yeah, there's a lot of swearing they take out of this show." Lies. The Japanese language doesn't have swear words, just a "polite" and "rude" way of saying things. (The whole concept of "profanity" is a product of Western religion, Catholicism in particular, and does not even have any meaning to a historically isolationist Far East civilization.) For just one example, "kuso" is never a polite term, but it literally means "excrement." How strong that is depends on context. However, many fan translators with less experience or care towards translations will simply pick the rudest or most shocking equivalent with no concern for the subtlety. Even professional translators struggle with this - Disney's translation of Princess Mononoke actually altered a line from something tame ("This soup tastes like water") to something not so tame ("This soup tastes like donkey piss") in their dub while trying to put the line in the context of "rude" Japanese.
  • The Naruto fandom complained that Tayuya of the Sound Five didn't swear in the dub, as her rudeness was not only a key character trait but also a plot point at one point in the story (when a character attempted to impersonate her and didn't pull it off); however in the dub her simply being rude is still evident because of the choice of words she uses anyway.
  • The story goes that the reason the DVD sets of Funimation's One Piece have the characters swearing as much as they do is because a large fraction of the OP fandom requested they put the swearing in. Funimation representatives would go to the forums and ask for feedback and fans who watched the fansubs would ask for stuff like Luffy saying he'd "kick [the bad guys'] ass". As a result the Funimation uncut dub at times sounds like it's overcompensating (thankfully, it gets less ridiculous as it goes on).
  • There are in fact quite a bit of fansubs that actually add American swear words. Because they assume Viewers are Morons and in fact can continue to deceive people this way.
    • Or they just want to have some fun at the viewers' expense.
• Speaking of One Piece, the series has a LOT of this. Just to give a few examples: The Government's law enforcers are referred to in Japanese as the "Kaigun" with the word "MARINE" written on their clothes. Thus, most fan-translations went with "Marine" to translate "Kaigun". "Kaigun" doesn't actually mean "Marine", it means "Navy". All English versions correctly translate it as "Navy", and this usually gets a backlash from fans claiming mistranslation. Funimation seems to use "Navy" and "Marine" interchangeably to curtail this though. Another good example is that Mr. 2 constantly refers to himself as a crossdresser (Okama) in the Japanese manga. Toei (the company who produce the anime adaption) objected to this for some reason (probably because he's a walking stereotype) and, in the Japanese version they changed all his references to being a "crossdresser" to being a "Ballerina". This is often called out as a form of "Funimation censorship" when seen in the dub or official subtitles, despite the fact that it was there in the Japanese version too. (Including pretty much all fansubs.)
• Anyone that tells you Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or Tokyo Mew Mew were shows for teens or adults that were "kiddified" by their English dubs. These are all, in fact, shows for children, general audiences, or at most young teens. Sometimes these complaints are justified, such as only airing Sailor Moon during timeslots for pre-schoolers or severely censoring the content, but sometimes they seem to stem from a mutation of the Animation Age Ghetto in which the fan doesn't want to admit they're watching a kids show. This could also stem from the difference in cultures between Japan/whatever country - starving oneself, lots of blood, Mind Rape and thirteen-year-old girls being stalked and threatened are permitted in Japanese kids' shows, but there's no way they'd appear in many Western shows made for the same age group.
• Even though the modern dub of Laputa: Castle in the Sky has won over many new fans, there are a number of naysayers who have been overly critical of it, and that like most dubs Miyazaki would be ashamed of it. Uh...no he isn't...he actually approved the dub and the only dub he actually said to ignore was the old bad dub of Nausicaa from the 80s. And let's not mention the "omg Castle in the sky should be castle Laputa". This was changed because Laputa happens to resemble the phrase "La Puta", which means "The Whore" in Spanish, a language that more people in North America are likely to understand than in Japan. What would you think if you saw a film on shelves that was called "Castle The Whore"? Would your first instincts of the Animation Age Ghetto kick in and think it's a stupid cartoon kids should be watching or would you actually wonder why the hell it's called "Castle The Whore" when it's pretty PG-rated (at most).
  • Granted; "Laputa" was actually from Gulliver's Travels, and "The whore" was actually the original intention.
• Although the dubs for Transformers Armada and Transformers Energon weren't all that great, the writing wasn't good in the original Japanese shows either. (Notably, the more favourably received Transformers Cybertron and Robots In Disguise were both full of Woolseyisms.)
• The original Macekre, Robotech even has some level of this. While Carl Macek did make the scripts for individual episodes, the whole "make one show using the footage from three" wasn't something he decided, and was in fact exactly what he was hired to do for the sake of a show with enough episode for syndication.
  • Poor Carl Macek can't catch a break. Although he was responsible for many of the Macekres, he is frequently given "credit" for almost every poorly localized release of '80s anime. Some have even blamed him for the American versions of Warriors of the Wind (which was produced by New World Pictures), Macross: Clash of the Bionoids (which was dubbed by the original Japanese studios and butchered by Just For Kids Video), Battle of the Planets (Sandy Frank) and Tranzor Z (3-B Productions).
    • Also he's also blamed for removing death and violence from the three series used for Robotech. Not a single death was removed from Macross, nor was any violence. He is also blamed for Robotech: The Movie. The studio in charge of the film rejected his original script, which apparently was mostly just a straight dub, and demanded all the changes made to it as they had found it depressing.
• Tokyo Pop has been accused of "flipping" the first series of the Kingdom Hearts manga. The manga was released that way in Japan as well.
• ADV Films occasionally catches flak for their Gag Dub of Ghost Stories from fans who accuse them of completely throwing out the original material just to move a few more DVDs. In fact, Aniplex, the studio responsible for the show's production, told ADV to do whatever they wanted to make the series sell, and approved the changes made by ADV.
• Geneon and adaptation studio New Generation Pictures caught some grief (on this very wiki, no less) for spelling Alucard's name as Arucard. While they wanted to use "Alucard," the Japanese producers insisted on "Arucard" since by their logic, "it's Dracura backwards." At least they got away with pronouncing it "Alucard" in the English dub.
• Geneon has been for "changing" Higurashi no Naku Koro ni's name to "When They Cry - Higurashi", when in fact, the Media Franchise that Higurashi belongs to is known as When They Cry in Japan.
  • And the anime of Umineko no Naku Koro ni (which hasn't been dubbed yet) got blamed for an instance of Kinzo turning into a dragon in the final episode that a lot of fans found to be rather ridiculous. Thing is, if you read the original VN, you'll see that the scene was, um, also there. It was just described in the narration and not visually rendered on the screen.
• To hear some people, the blame for the collapse of the anime market lies entirely on the backs of harem shows. There are several reasons besides that, such as overbidding, not reaching the right market, the changing market, and the collapse of the whole economy. Actually, many harem series, especially fanservice-laden ones, have been surprise successes -- Ikki Tousen and SHUFFLE!! come to mind—while cleaner or less formulaic shows get left in the dust.
  • A member of Media Blasters stated that getting titles returned is a normal part of releasing anime, except for Hentai which is never returned. This is why they don't dub regular niche titles, but will dub things like Queen's Blade. Sex sells, so Media Blasters will release it just so they can release shows they do like.
• The 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist is often accused of Character Exaggeration, but in at least two cases, it's really not the fault of the producers at all. The reason why Kimblee in the 2003 series is a fairly one-note psychopath as opposed to the surprisingly Affably Evil version of the manga is that at the time the 2003 anime was made, all of the manga material on Kimblee consisted of references to him being a gleeful war criminal, and so the 2003 anime's presentation of him is the result of making his character based on those references. Similarly, Mustang is a lot more of a Jerkass in the first anime (as opposed to having a Jerkass Facade), because it wasn't yet established in the manga that Mustang had an Urban Legend Love Life and wasn't actually a lech, and so understandably, the 2003 anime's Mustang ended up as a Licensed Sexist.
  • As a result of Adaptation Displacement, some fans of the 2003 anime make accusations that Brotherhood is a poor man's retelling of the first anime, without realizing there was a manga, and that Brotherhood is far more faithful to the source material than the 2003 version.
• Many Spanish Dragon Ball fans blame the Spanish translation team for all the silly or stupid changes in the anime. Actually, Spain bought Dragon Ball from France (Like Portugal, Germany and many other European countries did; it was common at the time), and about 90% or more of said changes are France's fault, not Spain's (Just ask any German or such about THEIR translation, for example.).
  • Of course, try telling that to Catalonians or Latin Americans who say their dubs are numerous times better because they don't have those mistakes (Even if the Catalonian dub has some of these issues as well, though they do have less of them). Especially on YouTube'. Come on, try telling the Spanish-Spain dub isn't hellspawn.
• Bang Zoom Entertainment, a dubbing company, was accused of using interns in dubbing some anime (in particular Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and The Familiar of Zero). While Bang Zoom did use people new to the business because it was cheaper (as the dubs had a low budget as they were made right before Geneon collapsed), none of the major characters were voiced by interns. Any interns who do voice work are simply doing incidental characters.
  • To expand on this... many grossly uninformed warriors in the Subbing vs. Dubbing conflict will claim that all English dub voice acting is done by interns, the director's friends/family, homeless people off the street, etc.
• There's one internet forum (no names will be mentioned to protect the innocent idiots) where one poster said that "Dragon Ball GT was a non-canon cash-in made by Funimation". Cue Face Palm.
  • For that matter, a lot of people who have apparently been so Scathed by Dragonball Z assume that anything Toriyama even does the art for is somehow his writing. For one, no, he was not responsible for the fillers and pacing of Dragonball Z. He wrote the story for Dragon Ball, etc, but the anime was purposely padded and had a lot of fillers merely because they didn't want to overtake the manga. If he was writing it, you would assume that he wouldn't have padded it so much to keep from overtaking the manga...wouldn't he? No, Toriyama did not willingly prolong the series...he actually had wanted to end the series as early as Dragon Ball with Goku winning the Tenkaichi Budokai. In fact, Dragonball Z was supposed to end with the Freeza saga, and then end with the Cell saga - but because it was so popular, people were wanting more. Likewise, Dragon Ball GT was intended to be ended with Baby. He also did not have as much involvement over GT as some people even say he did.
    • This "Toriyama is Anime POISON!" attitude has also unfotunately spread into other stuff he is involved in. Chrono Trigger is often given a free pass, but would you believe people sometimes refuse to play games like Dragon Quest and Blue Dragon because they assume they're Dragonball Z? Akira Toriyama has little to no involvement with the writing of Dragon Quest, he also did not do that much over the game design (Which was handled by Enix and other companies such as Level 5)
• Dragonball Z and the franchise both going forward and back are often subject to this. Fans will blame anything they don't like about the series... from the change in tone between the original series and Z, to Vegeta's resurrection and Heel Face Turn, to how long the series ran, to Dragon Ball GT as a whole, to Vegeta's mustache... on absolutely anyone but Akira Toriyama. Clearly Toriyama would not have done something they disliked, so somehow it was either the rabid stupid other fans or the evil greedy executives that made poor defenseless Akira Toriyama do it. Just how the fans could have forced him to do anything or which executives these are that could compel him to do so is never quite made clear.
• Macross Frontier is a strange combination of types 3,4, and 5. Fans blame Kawamori for not resolving the love triangle in the last episode because of favoritism and marketing, however this belief was due to a bunch of faked interviews made up by a once respected fan. In actuality it was Yoshino the series script writer who was at fault for the love triangle not resolving and for non of the reasons previously thought. But he also can't be blamed too much due to him being quite chatty when it comes to clarifying how the series ended. But this doesn't stop some of the Fan Dumb who Did Not Do the Research from blaming Kawamori for what happened for shipping reasons.
• One argument that has been used against the dub of Gurren Lagann is that in the English versions, the characters refer to the mecha's trademark FinishingMove as the "Giga Drill Break" instead of "Giga Drill Breaker." While "Break" admittedly doesn't sound as cool, that is actually what it's supposed to be called - "Breaker" is a Mondegreen coming from the Gratuitous English of "BUUUU-REEEEKKKKAAAAA!"
• Another 07th Expansion anime example: Ookamikakushi, which falls under Type 2. The ending sequence was almost entirely different from the actual ending in the Visual Novel. Those familiar with Higurashi claimed Ryukishi didn't even care about his own story, not realizing that, unlike Higurashi and Umineko, he had no involvement with this adaptation whatsoever, and that many plotpoints—including the aforementioned ending—that are heavily criticized weren't even in the original story.
• Many people who've seen the English dub of Xam'd: Lost Memories claim that the story makes no sense. While the story does get rather complicated with time, the primary reason for this is that the English dub is a Blind Idiot Translation. Context is off, word choice is misleading, and translations are inconsistent. For example:
  • "One more red mark (akaboshi) and I'll get disciplinary training." -> "Akaboshi's disciplinary committee's coming by again!"
  • "Don't be stupid. We purged those a long time ago." -> "Don't even joke about that. I don't want to be purged..."
  • "It's a 3 hour wait at the military hospital. You'd be long dead before the examination." -> "They always glare at you before examination."
• The Mysterious Cities of Gold is a joint French-Japanese program written by Frenchmen and animated by a Japanese company. This hasn't stopped accusations of French Bowdlerization of the "original Japanese" popping up when differences between the two translations are noted. In reality, the differences were due to a mutual agreement between the French writers and Japanese localizers to fit plot details to the differing expectations of their respective 80s-era audiences.

Comic Books

• Blaming a lot of the really crappy comics during the Silver Age on the Comics Code ignores the fact that most of these stories were just really bad on their own without any censorship.
  • Speaking of the Silver Age, a lot of people blame Fredric Wertham solely for the creation of the Comics Code, while he is only indirectly responsible for it. He published Seduction of the Innocent which lead to the social panic, which lead to the Code for sure. However, he was actually relatively moderate on the issue - he simply wanted comics to have a rating system; not for any remotely objectionable content to be banned.
  • On the subject of the Silver Age, many detractors of modern comics express distaste with formerly goofy, harmless villains now killing people. Even a cursory glance through some Silver Age comics reveals that these villains were always fond of casual murder; the only difference is that now they're occasionally successful at it.
• Feminists seem to get a lot of blame for Wonder Woman's depowering in the Bronze Age, however the complete opposite is true. While the decision to depower her was made to make the comic more appealing to feminists and women in general, DC came up with the idea all on their own - in fact it was backlash from the feminists that resulted in her getting repowered.
  • Also, both her depowering and Storm's are often taken as extremes of sexism regardless of whose order you think it's on. Often ignored is the fact that they were "demoted" to Charles Atlas Superpower-wielding Badass Normals who kicked as much ass as ever. If you were really depowering a character because you didn't like the idea of strong women, you wouldn't make them Xena-class asskicking machines.
• And then there's Wonder Woman's position as the secretary of the original Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics. This is often blamed on sexism, since she's a secretary and didn't go on missions. In fact, it was editorial policy that any character with their own solo book couldn't be a member at all (which is why Superman and Batman weren't included and Flash and Green Lantern got kicked out when All-Flash and Green Lantern started). Wonder Woman was made an exception because of her popularity and having a useless position as a secretary was better than similar male heroes who didn't get to be there at all.
• Bob Budiansky gets a lot of flak from Transformers fans for horrible writing in the Marvel comic, while Simon Furman is praised as the saviour of the series. They tend to ignore the fact that most of Budiansky's work was praised when it was originally released, and he even got a fan letter from Stan Lee for the "Decepticon Graffiti" story. The majority of Budiansky's work was easily as good as Furman's, but his entire opus was tainted by the burnout he suffered in his last few issues as he tried desperately to keep up with Hasbro's demands. In fact, some of his popular work is occasionally misattributed to Furman for just this reason.
  • Also, the extent to which the franchise is Budiansky's handiwork is often not understood - the early Marvel guys, him among them, were the people who were handed a bunch of toys and told to make them characters and a universe. Without him, Transformers as you know it never comes to be. If you're a TF fan, you have Bob to thank for way more of the things about the franchise you love than you realize - whichever series or comic happens to be your favorite, because all of them build on that original work to some extent.
• One More Day aside, Joe Quesada is apparently solely responsible for every hated story to come out of Marvel offices, during his tenure, he planned them, wrote them, drew them, colored them, lettered them, with no help from anyone, especially the creative team assigned to the book.
  • To a lesser extent, some people sure love pinning everything DC Comics is doing "wrong" on either Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns, or Grant Morrison.
  • Speaking of One More Day, JMS, the writer, has been both Mis-Blamed and Mis-Credited in its case. He was first blamed for creating the story until it was known Quesada ordered it - probably wouldn't have happened had he stuck to his guns and refused to have his name on it. When that came out, he was looked on as a hero for leaving the book and standing up against bad Executive Meddling - when in reality he supported the retcon but walked out because Quesada wouldn't let him take it even further and completely rewrite the Marvel Universe's entire history.
• Ken Penders has been given a lot of his from Sonic the Hedgehog fans, and comes in two flavors: bad stories misattributed to him, and dangling plot threads misexplained as him being a douche. In reality, most fans tend to forget that Ken lost his position as head writer to Karl Bollers for a good chunk of the timeframe most of the misattributed stories come from (in reality written by Bollers himself), and that Executive Meddling was pretty much a staple of the comic ever since issue 50, leading to confusion over whether Ken left the comic volunatrily due to conflicts with this meddling, or if he was fired because of it. Even the favorite accusations of old fans that he turned the Echidnas into a Spotlight-Stealing Squad that dragged down the main comic's quality seems to be off, as he had little choice in the matter, and the Knuckles comic that came from it, despite being Screwed by the Network, is still considered one of the best parts of the comic. Granted, there are bad stories that Ken has done, but not nearly the amount that is attributed to him.
• Some people seem to blame Adam Beechen for the mess that happened with Cassandra Cain, AKA the third Batgirl. Fact is, DC Comics simply told him to come up with a reason for Cass to be evil.
  • Although, fact is, he could have at least did some research on the character before doing so.
• Jack Schiff got blamed for injecting sci-fi elements into Batman's stories. In truth, it was editorial director Irwin Donenfeld's fault for having sci-fi be put into the DC output. Schiff recognised that aliens, spaceships, and the like had no place in Batman's detective storylines, and in fact, sci-fi is outside his aptitude as an editor. He argued against the management, but eventually gave in to pressure.

Film

• The belief that King Kong vs. Godzilla was edited for the US release to make King Kong win instead of Godzilla. Like Battle of the Planets, it was indeed heavily Macekred, but this wasn't part of it—the movie was one of the earlier ones, before Godzilla became a hero, which meant Godzilla had to lose (though not die) in every movie. Snopes.com confirms. This claim is so prevalent that even resources discussing the movies have mistakenly portrayed it as true.
• Among the complaints about Tim Burton's 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes was in its ending, which is significantly different from the original film. However, the new ending is actually closer to that of the original book.
  • There's also the fact that Burton's creative input may have been exaggerated to get the film extra publicity.
• The same complaints were alleged at Burton's adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Most of the complaints were in fact not departures from the original book, but actually more faithful to the book than the last movie was. In fact, one prominent film critic complained that the Burton adaptation had chickened out by showing the bad children having survived their ordeals where the 70s film had stayed "faithful", but the Burton film was actually being faithful to an identical scene in the book. The only drastic change to the film came towards the end with the subplot about Wonka's father, which is all Burton. The bad kids survived in the 70's movie, too, but a lot of people including that film critic apparently missed that phrase.
• Towards the end of Star Trek's most recent run on television, it became popular to blame everything that had ever gone wrong with the franchise on Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. This became most noticeable with the flop of Star Trek: Nemesis, with both being blamed for the screenplay, along with the fact that the film was released in the same week as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Braga was completely innocent, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Nemesis (or even the previous film, Star Trek: Insurrection). Berman was arguably responsible to some extent, as he contributed to the storyline and happily gave screenwriter John Logan a no rewrites clause, but the two big things he gets criticised for—the release date and the decision to hire Stuart Baird as director despite Baird knowing nothing about the franchise—were decisions made by Paramount without consulting Berman.
• Some odd-seeming Narrative Devices and Plots in old movies have been misblamed on Hays Office censorship. (Values Dissonance may be a better explanation.)
• As for the Romantic Plot Tumor in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay didn't put that in. It was Randall Wallace.
• Blaming every last thing about Batman and Robin on director Joel Schumacher is practically standard issue (to the point where his very strong filmography leading up to it is completely dismissed in discussions), but his actual involvement wasn't nearly as great as stated. He had no part in writing the script (and even then, many of the issues in the script were pure Executive Meddling for more merch) and the shift towards camp was something that audiences (if not the fans, anyway) reacted favorably towards in the previous film. He was pretty much handed a script and filmed it to the best of his professional ability. However, in the DVD commentary for the film, he insists on taking most of the blame and not dumping any of it on the screenwriter, so he's not helping.
  • The Bat-Nipples were all him though.
  • It actually makes sense from a professional point of view to take all the blame instead of trying to pass it onto others. Doing it that way makes it clear that he learned his lesson and wouldn't blame others for problems in any future films.
• A very common misconception about the film adaptation of Coraline was that Tim Burton directed it, especially when the trailers said "From the creator of The Nightmare Before Christmas". Actually, Henry Selick directed both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, and he doesn't always have a similar style like Tim Burton does with at least 60% of his films. (Including stop-motion).
  • That misconception seemed to be what the marketing was aiming for (probably figuring that implying Burton's involvement would get more people to see it).
  • Nine suffered from this as well. Tim Burton's name was attached to the movie and people assumed - partly because of the weird animation style, Scenery Gorn, and dark themes - that the whole thing was his. Shane Acker came up with the concept, co-wrote, and directed, while Burton just produced it. Also, people blamed Burton for taking the credit even though he clearly credits himself a producer.
• When it was eventually released, the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy met with a lukewarm response. Fans were quick to blame most of the elements that they disliked on Executive Meddling which butchered Douglas Adams' vision... apparently unaware that most of the more contentious material (such as the increased focus on the romance between Arthur and Trillian and the Humma Kavula subplot) were actually put in there by Adams himself.
  • For that matter, pretty much every Adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide was criticized for differences from the source material and crying "Adaptation Decay", despite that Adams has actually stated that he wanted the adaptations to be different.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was an idea and script created by legendarily cold, clinical director Stanley Kubrick, so when it was picked up after Kubrick's death by his hand-chosen successor, Steven Spielberg, a director notorious for his warm, humanistic and occasionally Narmy disposition, many Kubrick fans immediately wrote it off, and when they say it, blamed everything they saw was a weakness on Spielberg, but most of the things blamed on Spielberg (specifically the robotic talking teddy bear that is David's accompaniment throughout the film) were present in Kubrick's original script, and in fact may have been why Kubrick gave the project to Spielberg prior to his death, saying it was "closer to his sensibilities". The rather controversial After the End ending was also completely planned by Kubrick and not Spielberg.
  • It seems doubtful many people blamed the ending on Spielberg, as it's such a Kubrick premise. If anything, a Spielberg ending would have been more satisfying. If anyone blamed Spielberg, it was probably for keeping the ending as it was.
  • Kubrick isn't to blame for the robo-teddy either. He's already in Brian Aldiss' original short story.
• A lot of Harry Potter fans seem to dislike Michael Gambon as Dumbledore in the films. Some of this stems from comparing him with the late Richard Harris, but the rest seems to point towards "the yelling in Goblet of Fire". More recently, established fans seem to have shifted blame on the yelling scene to the director, though new fans are always around to dig up the old chestnut.
  • By now, it's pretty much taken as gospel that Steve Kloves is your average foamy-mouthed delusional Harmonian. The idea that he simply thought Harry and Hermione might end up together isn't actually unfounded, as J. K. Rowling mentioned once that "Steve Kloves who has been the script writer, who is enormously insightful on the series and a very good friend, after he read book seven he said to me, 'You know, I thought something was going to happen between Harry and Hermione, and I didn't know whether I wanted it or not.'" On the other hand, this statement clearly indicates that Kloves did not have an actual preference for Harry/Hermione, he just thought it might happen, and much less that he was actively inserting Harry/Hermione moments into the screenplays even after the ship didn't sail.
• When it was announced that The Secret of NIMH would be remade, a lot of people have credited Don Bluth's adaptation of being even more faithful and how this would automatically be less faithful. Yeah sure, Don Bluth's adaptation does follow the book it was based off of...for the most part. Those who read the books would know that Jenner actually didn't stick around and plot to murder a Nightmare Fuel Nicodemus and succeed...he actually deserted the rat colony, was overheard of as being electrocuted by a car motor (With other deserters), and Nicodemus actually did not die. On top of the fact that, you know, the film isn't even in theatres yet and there's very little indication on what even happens.
  • This would be one thing if this was announced in the 80s. Don Bluth probably didn't know there would be any others, since the movie was made before the two other NIMH books were written.
• The 2009 Sherlock Holmes differs greatly from other adaptations, especially the classic, genteel Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett interpretations, but one only has to look at the laundry-list of continuity nods on that page to realise that in terms of characterisation, the new film is remarkably faithful to Doyle's stories - just in a different direction from previous adaptations.
• William Shatner is usually blamed for absolutely everything wrong with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. While he made mistakes and his original idea was far too big and polarizing to ever truly be filmable (both of which he admits to, repeatedly, in his various books), the final product was actually a result of these being massively compounded by just about everything that could possibly go wrong with a movie, from delays to poor results from hired companies to equipment malfunction, resulting in the cutting, alteration, or downgrading of numerous scenes. The majority of this was simply beyond his control, and the fact that he even got the movie made in any coherent form is an accomplishment.
• A lot of X-Men fans blame Brett Ratner for every single problem with X-Men: The Last Stand. Others blame the film's original director, Matthew Vaughn, for screwing the film over by quitting right before the start of filming, and still others hold both men equally to blame. In actual fact, while you could make legitimate criticisms about both Ratner's direction and Vaughn's decision to quit, neither of them were responsible for the storyline. That was about 90% the same as the final film well before Vaughn had signed up, and neither director was permitted to make any serious changes to the screenplay (which, despite him giving "family reasons" for his decision to quit, was apparently a major factor in Vaughn leaving the film).
• While most reviewers managed to avoid falling into the trap of blaming Kevin Smith for the screenplay of Cop Out, which he didn't write, many blamed him for what were felt to be weak action sequences in the movie. In fact, Smith didn't direct any of the major action scenes—David R. Ellis (of Final Destination 2 and 4 fame) was bought in to handle those.
  • Of course, Smith was still the overall supervisor and the editor of the movie, so he was still responsible for making sure they looked competent.
  • On the other hand, some critics did think that Smith had written Cop Out, and misblamed him accordingly. Some acknowledged that he hadn't written the screenplay, but said that he should have rewritten it himself and so still deserved blame (which is a slightly more valid viewpoint, though rather naive of how things generally work in Hollywood).
• Roger Moore is often blamed for the James Bond franchise's turn to comedy in the '70s. But screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz was brought in specifically to add humorous touches to the last (at the time) Sean Connery movie, Diamonds Are Forever, which is as campy as any Moore flick. The real reason for the shift in tone was the perceived financial failure of the relatively serious On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which — while not a big flop as is often believed — was less profitable than previous films in the series.
• Star Wars fans are so certain that the decision to make Greedo shoot at Han during the cantina scene in the "Special Edition" version of A New Hope is proof that George Lucas has completely lost touch with his earlier work that "Han Shot First" has been adapted as a rallying cry for fans to reject everything Lucas has done since the 1980s. Actual evidence would seem to indicate that the change was mandated to prevent the film from getting its rating changed from PG to PG-13 (which didn't exist when the film first hit theaters). The fact that Lucas has made public appearances wearing a "Han Shot First" t-shirt should tell you what his preference on the scene really is.
  • ...Until he made the recent statement that never intended Han to shoot first.
  • Almost every negative review of The Phantom Menace (particularly of the "vitriolic fan rant" variety) lambasts Natalie Portman's performance as Queen Amidala as flat and lifeless. For one thing, this misses the point that she's intentionally speaking that way to make it as easy as possible for her handmaidens/decoys to impersonate her voice (the fact that Portman's performance as "handmaiden" Padme is considerably less flat and lifeless should be a clue to that). More importantly, though, such reviews frequently single out for criticism scenes in which it isn't actually Portman in the Queen Amidala makeup (here's a hint: If Natalie Portman is clearly visible standing behind the Queen, don't criticize Portman for the Queen's performance in that scene^[2]).
  • "George Lucas, Natalie Portman, and both the actors who played Anakin are responsible for everything bad in Star Wars ever. Ever."
  • Also, George had little to do with the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.
• Michael Bay and the screenwriters of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may be guilty of many crimes against art, but they did not, as the Agony Booth review accuses, feel the need to "make up a new character like the Fallen instead of using someone (or something) established like Unicron." The Fallen was a pre-existing character, taken from the comics. (The review was later corrected.)
  • Meanwhile, Michael Bay suffers type 5 misblame, apparently being singlehandedly responsible for everything one dislikes about the movies, up to and including things like new characters with the names of older characters (a well-established practice in Transformers in general, as a method of maintaining trademarks to avoid repeats of what happened to characters like Trailbreaker Trailcutter).
  • Forget Michael Bay, Shia Labeouf is actually the person personally responsible for everything wrong with Transformers. He's also the responsible for every fault of the fourth Indiana Jones movies.
• In The Nostalgia Chick's review of the film, she blames Barry Manilow for the songs in Thumbelina, despite the fact that he only wrote the music, not the lyrics.
• Film composers often get the blame and labled with stigma for adapting a piece of classical or contemporary music into their film score. Generally during the editing stages of the film temp music is placed before the score is completed and it's common for directors and exeuctives to "fall in love" with the temp score. And it's usually to rewrite it just enough to slip by rather than pay the extra money to license a work (for non public domain).
• There seems to be a lot of hatred towards the Wachowskis for the sequels to The Matrix (including an awful lot of people blaming Lana's sex change for the quality of the films, despite the fact that she didn't start her reassignment therapy until well after Revolutions had already been released). It should be known, however, that there was quite a bit of Executive Meddling with the sequels; originally the siblings wanted to do a prequel and a sequel, but WB didn't want to make a Matrix movie without Keanu, Fishborne, Moss, etc. Thus the prequel idea got shortened into the Second Renaissance segment of The Animatrix and the sequel idea got dragged out into the two-part mess we know today.
• The director of Punisher: War Zone openly lambasted the 2004 movie for having comedic parts such as the popsicle-torture. In fact, that scene was lifted almost directly from the comics, and Garth Ennis, who greatly helped in raising the Punisher back to popularity in the comics, has mentioned that as his favourite scene from the older comics.
• Numerous fans and critics blamed the shifting of John Constantine's nationality and the setting in the Constantine movie on Keanu Reeves, claiming that it was because he couldn't do an English accent. (He can, even if not perfectly.) However, as confirmed by various people involved, the shift to California was a decision made some time before Reeves was ever approached with the offer.
• In 2010, MGM has been bashed excessively by internet users (who have been Tainted by the Preview) when their financial problems delayed production of Bond 23 and The Hobbit, not to mention remakes of Red Dawn and RoboCop. Of course, most of these users are fans of these franchises, who believe MGM stole James Bond from Sony^[3] and The Hobbit from New Line Cinema,^[4] and that the studio is apparently meddling with these projects. This backlash somehow led to a Yahoo! Answers question asking about it.
• Due to George Lucas's status as a Scapegoat Creator, fans were quick to blame him for the infamous fridge nuking scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg admitted that it was his idea (and that he was happy to have brought that silly idea into popular culture), although he did also say that the aliens were Lucas's idea.
  • The idea is Older Than They Think: the fridge nuking scene was in the mid-1990s "Saucermen from Mars" script written by Jeb Stuart.

Literature

• There was a small debacle when fans of the comic Books of Magic accused J. K. Rowling of ripping it off. Nobody has confirmed this, and in fact, even Neil Gaiman admitted that neither Rowling or himself were the first people who created a bespectacled young man destined to become a great wizard, or send him to school. But it got worse when a magazine said Gaiman accused Rowling of pinching his idea. Immediately Gaiman defended himself against the person who misblamed him and said, "I did NOT accuse her of that!". He even admits that if anything, they were more inspired by fantasy authors writing Arthurian legends moreso than each other.
  • Terry Pratchett has likewise had to fend off numerous accusations that he'd ripped off J.K. Rowling with Equal Rites, despite the latter having been written in 1987. When he's pointed this out, some fans have turned around and misblamed him for accusing Rowling of stealing his work! The similarities between them mostly amount to this: there is a school for magic users, someone in the book uses a broomstick to fly. Someone is turned partially or entirely into a pig, goats are mentioned a couple times.
    • An accusation also leveled at him for the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy (even though the similarities pretty much begin and end with Johnny and Kirsty being similar characters to Harry and Hermione).
• One of the complaints about the Wheel of Time infamous covers, is that Lan is shown to have a samurai based helmet in the first book, claiming that only the Seanchan have Samurai based helmets. Actually, Lan did have a helmet just like the one on the cover of the book during the Aiel war. It was based off of the one used by the famous Samurai Date Masamune. In fact Lan's helmet was probably the most accurate thing about that cover.
• All of the books with "Tom Clancy's" on the cover were, in fact, written by other authors, with pretty much no imput on the contents of said books by Mr. Clancy himself, past laying out the setting for the various series. When people complain about Mr. Clancy's works, however, often those licensed books are cited as examples of the quality of his writing (or, specifically, lack thereof).
• Quite a few people blame William Shatner for the fact that his name is plastered all over the cover and marketing of the Star Trek novels that he co-wrote with Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Judith Reeves-Stevens, and accuse him of pushing them to the sidelines for the sake of his ego. Fact of the matter is that writers have little, if any, say in the cover design of their books and the publishers did it because his name carries more weight outside of the Trek Expanded Universe readership than the Reeves-Stevens do.
• Richard Knaak of the World of Warcraft Lore does recieve some of this. While the man does certainly have weaknesses in his writing style (Mary Sues for instance) he doesn't exactly go around changing the lore as he sees fit. He does discuss things with the rest of the lore team before hand, and he does have to get their approval before he makes any major change. While he is guilty of at least a few sins, changing the lore because he feels like it isn't one of them.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe Karen Traviss gets a lot of flak, most notoriously for establishing that the Grand Army Of The Republic constituted a mere three million clones. While this number is ridiculously low for a galactic scale conflict (the Eastern Front in WWII alone had somewhere around 15 million troops), what people failed to take into account was that the basis for the clone troop numbers first appeared in the Attack of the Clones movie novelization, an upper tier canon work that came out in 2002, which told us that the million more well on the way was a million clone warriors and that it would take time to produce more. Traviss was a lesser tier canon author who didn't come around until 2004, meaning that in order for her to be responsible for these numbers, she'd have had to have broken causality. Unfortunately, this created a substantial amount of conflict when other authors missed the higher-canon established figures, and did things like give the Separatists an army in the quintillions. The resulting flame wars were not pretty to say the least.

Live Action TV

• The American Power Rangers is often accused of adding unnecessary silly humour. Ironic, since the humour in Power Rangers is usually far less prevalent and far less silly than in the original Super Sentai.
  • The best way to explain the differences between Power Rangers and Super Sentai is that Rangers stays in the middle whereas Sentai goes to BOTH extremes. Yes, it is less silly and does cut out a lot of the over-the-top cuteness of the Japanese version, but at the same time, because the Moral Guardians seem to be less strict in Japan, they are also allowed to show blood, use guns, and have characters actually die. Oddly enough, each show is Lighter and Softer and Darker and Edgier than the other at the same time.
  • Additionally, Bruce Kalish was NOT, contrary to what every part of the Fan Dumb will tell you, responsible for the excessive explosions during his and the rest of Disney's run on the franchise. That was actually done by Koichi Sakamoto, who, in fact, has worked on the series with both Saban and Disney, and even does work on the Sentai versions. But Kalish was the executive producer, and thus, everything was his fault.
• The poorly received third season of the original Star Trek: The Original Series was largely blamed on the showrunner Fred Freiberger. But most of the cast and crew have worked to denounce that idea because of several major reasons. First, Gene Roddenberry had left the writing duties in the third season, he (the creator) only had a minor influence on the show. Second, Gene Roddenberry left because the network promised a juicy Tuesday night spot, only to renounce it and give them the Friday Night Death Slot. Third, the production budget was always below par for a sci-fi series, and the budget was slashed another 10 percent, which affects the scripts heavily. Freiberger was doing his best on a show that was sinking fast.
  • In regards to Rick Berman and Brannon Braga's control of the franchise in later years, fans seem to often believe that they had complete control over it even above Paramount Productions. They were actually not immune from any Executive Meddling and were given demands that have compromised the various shows. This shows primarily in the TNG-esque nature of Voyager, which had started off fairly unique unto itself. But with Deep Space Nine underperforming in ratings, Executive Meddling demanded that the more TNG-like Voyager to stay with the TNG formula. Those demands largely hurt the morale at the show, Ronald Moore said was extremely depressing being in the writers room.
  • Additionally, some seem to be under the illusion that Brannon Braga was the Show Runner for the entire run of Voyager, and so lay the blame for the show's quality at his feet. In actual fact, he was only the showrunner on two out of the show's seven seasons — Jeri Taylor was the main showrunner for most of the show's history, and in an odd inversion of the trope, receives virtually no blame from the fans but quite a bit from the other writers who worked on the show. On the other hand, Braga was the showrunner for all but one season of Star Trek: Enterprise, so he has more to answer for on that count.
• The low quality of seasons 21-23 of Doctor Who's original run was for a long time blamed on Colin Baker's performance as the Sixth Doctor. After his surprisingly good performances in the Big Finish audio plays, he's largely cleared his name, leading fans to look to other scapegoats.
  • Doctor Who fans have a tendency to find one particular behind-the-scenes figure — John Nathan-Turner, Michael Grade, Russell T. Davies, etc — and blame absolutely everything they don't like on that figure, regardless of whether they can be reasonably blamed or not.
  • When Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones) left after the third series of the revived show, some fans insisted she had either been fired or pressured to leave because the producers felt she could not live up to her extremely popular predecessor, Billie Piper (it didn't help that onscreen Martha left the Doctor for this reason.) This was denied by all involved, but it still pops up occasionally as a conspiracy theory in the fandom.
    • It's possible that she had only signed on for one series. Christopher Eccleston appeared to have left for similar reasons (on top of the hectic shooting schedule); there has been no definitive proof that the 40-something actor left after one series due to being "typecast".
    • Martha has also fallen victim to a Type 3: her character has received criticism for not being confident enough in herself (particularly in her unrequited feelings for the Doctor), and not being convincing as a professional adult. This seems to be based on a misconception by US viewers about the character's intended age: medical students in Britain start studying at age 18, so Martha could well be a teenager, and cannot be any older than 22 or so. There's no in-story reason for her to be particularly worldly-wise.
• The regrettable murder storyline from the second season of Friday Night Lights was such a huge departure from season one's low key, realistic tone that everyone was sure it was all NBC's Executive Meddling trying to get the show's middling Ratings up. Turns out, it was entirely the idea of the show's producers. However, NBC really didn't help with all their commercials focusing on the storyline, showing an incredibly misunderstanding of what the show's fans wanted to see.
  • Or they assumed that the show's fans would be watching anyway, but that promoting the murder storyline would bring in people who had previously not watched much of the show.
• Every single cast change in Mystery Science Theater 3000 (quite a few, as by the end the entire original cast was gone) was blamed on Jim Mallon, who the fans portrayed as a tyrant imposing his will on everyone else involved with the show. This even happened with the departure of Joel Hodgson, who not only had the same level of creative control as Mallon but created the show in the first place, so no one could make him leave if he didn't want to. There had been some behind the scenes friction between the two men that ultimately led to Joel's departure, but much of this has been blown out of proportion by the fanbase and Joel himself has had to play damage control more than a few times.
• Pretty much anything that went wrong with Dollhouse is blamed on Fox, even when Joss Whedon himself takes credit for such things as drastic changes or shooting a new pilot. Granted, it's hard to blame the fans. Fox did cancel Firefly, which was definitely a high-quality show that got screwed by Executive Meddling. But it's like Whedonites have a constant persecution complex up and running - All. The. Time.
  • Firefly is the perfect example of the above-mentioned phenomenon where a popular show gets cancelled because the "wrong" audience liked it. Quoth the producer: "The initial results – they made the network nervous. The men didn’t respond as strongly as they thought they would, and the women responded more strongly."
• Nikki and Paolo are universally despised by most Lost fans for their sudden introduction, questionable relevance to the main plot and the false pretense to "have been here all along". Yet the reason the characters were created in the first place is because fans themselves often asked about the stories of the random extras seen carrying wood or something while main characters were discussing important stuff.
• My So-Called Life fans tend to blame the show's one-season run on either a) Screwed by the Network or b) Claire Danes (who was, it's worth pointing out, all of 16) being a prima donna and refusing to sign for a second season. The producer statements have been ambiguous, but the most likely interpretation is that the network didn't offer a renewal until Claire had other commitments that she didn't want to back out of, and the producers threw up their hands rather than try to negotiate.
• Fans of the American version of Big Brother seemed to have blamed that the recent eviction of Jeff was somehow the producer's fault. Sure, Executive Meddling has been the most likely culprit for several game-changing instances, but there was clearly no Executive Meddling, obvious case of misblame there. Why would CBS meddle in a ratings dog? (The viewers literally dropped by half after his eviction.)
• George Lucas' Hatedom will sometimes blame him for the quality of The Star Wars Holiday Special (see, for example, the final paragraphs of this article). The fact is, Lucas wrote up a basic story outline, and left CBS to finish it while he worked on The Empire Strikes Back. Without Lucas' involvement, the producers rewrote much of the original script, turning it into the 70's-variety-show schlock-fest that we all love to hate. It appears that contractual obligations were the only reason that Lucas allowed the finished product to air.
  • Not to mention Lucas has gone on record saying that he wants to destroy every copy of the Holiday Special.
• Marti Noxon is frequently blamed for absolutely everything fans didn't like about the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, Ianto's character arc involved him beginning to accept his bisexuality and come out to his family about his relationship with Jack - then he was suddenly and unexpectedly killed off. Many fans were not happy, and blamed Russell T. Davies (despite the fact that he is openly gay and has introduced a variety of LGBT characters on both Torchwood and Doctor Who.) He denied that sexuality had anything to do with it, and insisted Ianto was just "defeated by a greater evil" for plot purposes. Some people then turned their ire towards writer James Moran, who has also stated that there was no malicious intent behind the decision.
• The mess between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien was mostly caused by Executive Meddling from NBC, particularly from Jeff Zucker. The court of public opinion has ruled that it's all Leno's fault and that he was trying to horn in on Conan's Tonight Show because he's a selfish slimeball. True, maybe he shouldn't have accepted NBC's offer to move back to 11:35, but basically everything that is attributed to Leno was really done by Zucker. (And the quality of Leno's humor is subjective and is honestly irrelevant to the debate.)
  • The past couple weeks, particularly the Oprah interview, suggest that Leno was more than a little complicit in all of this, or at least overly apologist towards NBC. Between Letterman and now refusing to let go of his place in Late Night for O'Brien, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to call Leno a passive-aggressive backstabber.
    • Of course, it has also been suggested that Conan was himself complicit in the Executive Meddling that saw Leno leave The Tonight Show and him takeover in the first place.
      • His contract stipulated that he would become the host of the show within a set period of time. Leno never wanted to leave, and any statements to the contrary were required of him by the studio. To rub it in even further, Conan's TBS show now does a third of what Leno does on Tonight in the ratings.
        • Conan simply made an offer, basically stating he would consider leaving the network if there wouldn't be any opportunities for advancement in sight. The thing is that Leno agreed to the contract. It's safe to say that had he really wanted to, he could have made a case for a couple more years at the very least.
  • Conan was going to be screwed either way. Leno could've declined, and got himself and his staff fired along with Conan's, or accepted and saved the jobs of all the people working on the Tonight Show.
• Heroes fans who blame the scrappiness of certain characters on the actors who portray them.
  • Poor Dania Ramirez, who played Maya, is probably the all time example of this. Yes, Maya was annoying, but Dania Ramirez did not write or direct the 11,000 scenes in which her character cried, screamed for her brother, and/or acted useless.
  • Likewise, Mohinder's actor Sendhil Ramamurthy has been incredibly snarky about his own character's permanent possession of the Idiot Ball during some episode commentaries, to the point where it's pretty obvious he only WISHES he had control over the scripts. In fact, Mohinder's storyline would probably get a lot more entertaining if he did.
  • Heroes was also a victim of extensive Executive Meddling by NBC (not to mention the writer's strike).
• Did you ever hear about that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant who lost on the first couple questions? Yeah, there have been several contestants who got the first couple questions wrong (Including Richard Hatch from Survivor), but did you hear about this American/British/Irish/Australian/Whatever the acceptable target is woman who used all her lifelines on one question and still got it wrong? And she said that an Elephant was bigger than the moon? Well, the contestant in the picture actually walked away with £32,000, it was a photoshopped image.
  • Likewise, the Cuntflaps word on Countdown was also a photoshopped; if you look at the video, you can see that the "N" sometimes twitches around during the Countdown.
• Arguably Lizzie McGuire qualifies as an inversion of type 1 (not that the show had no flaws, just that it's the successors that had the flaws generally associated with the work) mixed with type 2. It is usually blamed by people (especially on the internet) for Disney Channel's current batch of low budget Strictly Formula shows with over the top humor, wacky plots, weird premises, and laugh tracks, despite the fact that it really had none of those (Lizzie was supposed to be a normal girl, there wasn't a laugh track, and the show didn't look particularly cheap) and wasn't even made by the same production company. This may be because this was the show that really promoted Disney Channel to the forefront.
• Viewers of the Game of Thrones TV series, especially those who prefer the books (don't worry about figuring out which those are, they'll be sure to tell you), often blame any changes or perceived Character Derailment due to those changes on the show's head writers. Most of the changes are either endorsed by or directly come from George RR Martin himself.
  • Specifically, in episode nine of season five, Stannis burns his daughter Shireen alive as a sacrifice. Many viewers went into a tizzy, with book fans specifically citing that it was something the book version of the character would never do (citing a few short sentences as evidence) and that the writers were awful awful hacks. This ignores that 1) the show version of the character made those same statements as the book version, but only more effusive, and had continued to do so all the way up through episode eight, and 2) GRRM himself told the show writers it was going to happen. The book version of the character essentially just hasn't gotten around to it.

Music

• For years, Yoko Ono's been blamed for causing the break-up of The Beatles, when it's largely clear that internal band tensions (which would be not entirely unreasonable given that the four members of the band had essentially spent almost the entire 1960s pretty much trapped together) and increasingly diverging musical interests and pursuits would have probably done the job sooner or later no matter who John Lennon decided to get romantically involved with. It is fair to say that her increased presence in the studio was annoying to the other three Beatles, recordings having previously been a 'no girlfriends' zone, and by all accounts she didn't exactly make much of an effort to make friends, none of which exactly helped matters; but even they acknowledge that she probably doesn't deserve all the stick that she gets.
  • Not sure about the others, but it's worth noting that as early as 1971, George Harrison said publicly (on the Dick Cavett show) that Yoko was being misblamed, and that the Beatles broke themselves up. Not that it made much difference...
  • It's also possibly a degree of backlash to the attempt by some of Ono's fans to paint her as a saint and the truly important one in the relationship, and the Beatles as just some piddly side project Lennon was killing time with until he hooked up with Ono and his life really began. That sort of thing can tend to cause... contrariness.
• Lots of Gackt and/or Malice Mizer fans tend to treat Gackt's departure from MM as Mana's fault. Public opinion often portrays Mana as a wicked schemer who didn't like Gackt's behavior for some reason, so he began forcing him away from the band and then literally kicked Gackt out. It's usually come from one of Gackts misquotes saying ?I was asked to leave Malice Mizer?. Gackt really meant that Mana asked him whether he still wanted to stay in the band and said that if he didn't nobody would stand on his way. Gacky himself admitted later on that he saw MM as a temporary jump-start project and he always wanted to pursue solo career. He was, in fact, interested in MM because he loved classic music since childhood but he never was into VK, EGL, EGA and other gothic stuff. Mana on the other hand thought that Gackt was the best suitable for MM and the band wouldn't be the same without him. That explains why Mana couldn't find a new vocalist for 2 year until he briefly recruited Klaha who's mannerism and appearance was almost identical to Gackt's. Then he just disbanded Malice Mizer to form Moi Dix Moi which fairly wasn't too much different from MM.
  • It gets worse from there. Mana's reputation as not just a schemer, but also an arrogant, sadistic and jealous primadonna who can't stand anyone more popular or talented than him, has stuck. He now gets blamed by a significant number of people every time someone he works with leaves or a band on his label splits up. Admittedly, Moi Dix Mois' High Turnover Rate, as well as Mana's stoic and emotionless public image doesn't help, but it really has gone too far. The really sad thing is that half the people who believe it don't even listen to Malice Mizer or Moi Dix Mois, and only think Mana's to blame for everything because everyone else in whichever Jrock community they belong to treats it as fact.
• The opposite happened with reactions on La:Sadie's disbanding when almost every time Kisaki was solemnly blamed. Most typical reason is "the band wanted to go major while Kisaki wanted to stay indies". Which doesn't make sense because: 1)There is no clear reason for why an aspiring musician would want to stay indies (major gives a lot more possibilities). 2)And Kisaki was never against becoming major and his later activities kind of prove it. Every band he's been involved ever since was significantly more major than the previous one. Up the last band Phantasmagoria which was a living definition of majorism and him founding his own major record company Undercode Productions. Now he said he's retiring to focus on producing (producing = promoting various indies band to majors; Undercode had done dozen of these already). So the more legit reasons are Kaoru's lead persona and the fact that the band met Toshiya from D+ L on a joint concert and liked him so much, that they "stole" him.
  • There are reasons an aspiring musician may not want to go Major. The main one being that, while going major does bring more exposure and opportunities, it can also bring a lot of Executive Meddling and loss of creative control, which not every artist wants to have to deal with.
• The fact that T. Rex's "Get It On" was released stateside as "Bang a Gong" is often held up as an example of American prudishness, when the truth is almost the exact opposite: there was already a jazz fusion song entitled "Get It On" on the American charts.
• Sammy Hagar tends to get flack from former Van Halen fans regarding the groups switch to a Power Ballad sound after he joined. In fact, Eddie Van Halen was already moving in this direction before (and was a considerable factor behind David Lee Roth quitting the band).
• Every time Motley Crue does something that displeases the fans, there are always three camps placing blame for it on either Vince Neil (for being a prima donna), Nikki Sixx (for being a control freak), or Tommy Lee (for being kind of an idiot). Mick Mars seems to have some kind of mystical immunity to this effect.
• There are two different versions of the photo collage on the back cover of the original 1967 vinyl edition of Headquarters by The Monkees: one where the center picture shows the album's producer and a recording engineer, and the other showing the Monkees with facial hair. When new generations of Monkees fans rediscovered the album, they assumed the bearded Monkees pic was the original, but the record label was afraid people would complain about their teen idols no longer being clean-cut, so they substituted it with the other. In fact, it was the other way around: the producer-engineer pic was the original, but the caption mis-identified the engineer, so they replaced it with the bearded Monkees.
• Many Genesis fans blame Phil Collins for the band's shift away from Progressive Rock to pop in The Eighties. Collins is on record as saying that the shift occurred because Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks saw the solo success he was having and wanted a piece of that as well. Collins said on his (now defunct) official forum that (paraphrasing from memory) "I'd like to see someone convince Tony Banks to do something he doesn't want to do!".
  • Also according to Word of God, as the band were shifted from a five-piece to a four-piece to a trio, the band were attempting to avoid the fights over writing credits and creative input they were facing with the departures of Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett by crediting the entire band with all the songs on each album, and by deciding to come in the studio with no pre-written material. They also discovered that a great deal of magic came with group improvisations, and that by shortening the group compositions they could get more of a variety of styles. They were also, by 1981, equipped with their own recording facility (Fisher Lane Farms), and were interested in reinventing their sound for The Eighties, producing their own music along with engineer Hugh Padgham. What came out of these circumstances was Abacab and the music they came up with since then. The results of having commercial success with their new sound and approach was simply icing on the cake.
  • On a similar note, Banks is often blamed for the creative conflicts that led to the departure of Gabriel and Hackett, down to excluding Gabriel from the songwriting for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and passive-aggressively mixing Hackett out of the band's second live album.^[5] This of course ignores Gabriel's problems with his wife and daughter around the same time (although he did end up writing the lyrics and overall story of the album) and the fact that the Banks/Collins/Rutherford trio had already gelled into the main creative force in the band. In fact, the band started crediting individual writers for each song in order to escape the notion that Gabriel wrote everything.
• Mike Love is blamed by many Beach Boys fans for the non-release of "Smile" in 1967. While Mike can be hated for a lot of reasons (look up his acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on behalf of the Beach Boys), this is not solely his fault. It was actually a combination of a royalties lawsuit against Capitol filed by the Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks leaving, Brian Wilson's mental problems and the beginning of his drug problems, and a lack of support from other members (including Mike).
• Liz Phair has gained some infamy in the music industry for "selling out." Despite what some "fans" choose to believe, it wasn't Liz's fault. Her indie record label Matador Records dumped her onto the major Capitol Records. They wouldn't give her money to record an album unless she worked with mainstream producers and made a pop album. If Matador Records didn't give Liz away, then she most likely would have continued on her indie rock route.
• Rebecca's Black's "Friday" was an autotuned single produced on a budget of a few thousand bucks and was posted on Youtube. It soon went viral, mostly from people pointing and laughing, metaphorically speaking. A certain imgboard began to troll her, including death threats and posting her school schedule online. Yet when she went on Good Morning America talking about how hurt she was, a lot of people blamed her parents and the video production company, instead of the people doing the actual trolling. (Compare to the tone of Gawker's own earlier posts, which were much less sympathetic.) Also, she apparently doesn't get to complain because the single is selling very well and she's rich now.
  • Also, she is perceived as in it for the money or something or doing this on purpose, but actually she's just the one video that got lucky and had enough YouTube views to get famous. YouTube, and in fact Real Life itself is full of girls with decent singing voices who want/ have record deals and film low budget music videos.
• Black Flag fans tend to be divided over the more experimental, heavy metal influenced direction the band started heading in after Damaged. Those who don't like this period sometimes blame Henry Rollins for the change (or at least the "heavy metal" aspect of it). While Rollins was the Face of the Band at the time and contributed to the songwriting process, founding member Greg Ginn was still writing most of the band's music, and he was mainly the one behind their change in direction. In fact he said part of the reason Rollins was hired as a singer was because he wasn't solely interested in singing Hardcore Punk songs. That said, Ginn did lament that ever since Rollins joined they had to consistently keep things dark and edgy lyrically.

Professional Wrestling

• In general, because of the Kayfabe heavy nature of the proceedings, Professional Wrestling does it best to obfuscate who exactly is to blame for what on and off screen. It's not entirely the fans' fault if they criticize the on-screen culprit of a Worked Shoot in a Real Life Writes the Plot situation, when the actual people behind the scenes have done their damndest to confuse the issue.
• According to TNA Wrestling owner Dixie Carter, the fans' chants of "Fire Russo!" are mis-blame, as Vince Russo only has a small part in writing their shows. Disregarding the fact that the shows still have Russo's Signature Style all over them, this hardly makes for a better situation, as it implies that the entire booking team has their collective heads up their asses, rather than just one member.
• Vince Russo's booking in general. Even during his disastrous stint as the booker of WCW, a key thing to keep in mind is that, despite the booking meetings being attended by plenty of wrestling veterans and staff, no-one hammered into him just how dumb some of his ideas were. In WCW's case, it was a widespread case of They Just Didn't Care by that point.
  • One thing Russo is blamed for that he shouldn't is the "Mae Young gives birth to a hand" skit, which took place in early 2000, months after he left the WWF.
• For a long time, David Arquette received a large amount of undeserved flak for his winning of the WCW championship by people thinking that he was the driving force behind the angle. A) He wasn't, B) as a wrestling fan, he knew it was a terrible idea and would've refused to do it had he not been contractually obligated, and C) he donated all of the money he made on the shows to paralyzed wrestler Darren Drozdov and the families of the late Brian Pillman and Owen Hart.
• John Cena gets constant flak for being a boring Invincible Hero and his Five Moves of Doom (amongst other things), yet as a performer he really doesn't get the final say in the matter. Executive Meddling is responsible for telling him what moves to do and how he should wrestle his matches.
  • In fact, Cena said in an interview in the summer of '06 that he wanted to drop out of the Main Event scene after he jobbed to Edge at New Year's Revolution and turn heel to refresh his character. The writers collectively slapped him down and continued to write all of his lines at shows like they had since '03 when he turned face.
• People tend to blame Vince McMahon for everything bad in the WWE; while it is true that he has final say on what goes on TV a lot of the more controversial angles where others were the idea of other people working for the company (For instance the infamous "Katie Vick" mannequin necrophilia angle was the brainchild of executive producer Kevin Dunn, though Vince has defended it pretty strongly and gladly taken "responsibility" for it in interviews, confusing the issue.)
  • This is especially true for 93-94 at which time Vince had actually taken a leave of absence for legal reasons and the company was being run by Pat Patterson.
• A lot of ECW fans blame TNN for what they saw as lower quality shows when it was on that network. TNN actually had a completely hands off approach to ECW (which apparently included promoting them which is how they were Screwed by the Network) however everything on TV was done by Paul Heyman. This confusion is not helped by the inclusion of a Kayfabe network representative Heel whose character attempted to tone down the hardcore style ECW was known for.
• Hulk Hogan tends to be blamed for holding people back and not jobbing cleanly, and indeed he has used his pull and fame more than a few times for personal gain or vendettas (like getting WCW to fire color commentator Jesse Ventura). However, he was never a booker and even though he had creative control, he did not decide on the angles that didn't concern him. Management is to blame for most of the mishandling of people like Billy Kidman and Lex Luger.
  • One particularly egregious example of him being misblamed is for the botched ending of his match against Sting in Starrcade 1997. Several people to this day claim that Hogan bribed Nick Patrick to intentionally count at regular speed, to make Sting look bad when he kicked out when he was supposed to (after "three"). There is no real evidence that Patrick didn't just make a mistake, other than general rumors of Hogan's backstage behaviors.
• The reason above can also apply to Triple H starting from 2002 onwards, especially due to his longtime relationship with Stephanie McMahon, holding back Smark favorites like Evan Bourne and Shelton Benjamin. Of course, this often avoids factors like Stone Cold Steve Austin's retirement from wrestling and The Rock becoming an actor depleting the WWE's main event talent until guys like John Cena and Batista were ready. Or that Vince Mcmahon has always favored not only the larger wrestlers but the ones who can exude the most over-the-top personality even before Triple H was in the WWE.
  • Frankly, Triple H is pretty much the lightning rod for the fans wrath, regardless of whether or not he had anything to do with it. Considering he's married to the head of the WWE's creative department (and, if you believe some of the nastier rumors, closer to Vince than his own son Shane,) he's always accused to steering the company to always benefit himself. Have a favorite wrestler who isn't being pushed? Triple H is holding them back because he's "threatened." Crappy storyline? Triple H is burying someone he doesn't like. It remains to be seen if the blame will lessen now that he's stepped away from wrestling or get worse since he's moved into the talent executive position that's awaited him for years.
• The Montreal Screwjob was such a chaotic situation, and Kayfabe and worked shoots have further muddied the issue until a lot of people are badly misinformed about what actually happened. That being said. Triple H was not a major contributor to the Montreal Screwjob, although as Shawn Michaels' buddy he was in on it. He claims to have been the one to give Vince the idea of doing something drastic about Hart and the title, this is unsubstantiated. Pat Patterson was not involved at all - he was the one WWF higher up who was specifically kept in the dark. Invertedly, Earl Hebner was in on the entire thing from close to the beginning, is frequently described as having been unaware of anything until minutes before the match and having been bullied into going along with it against his wishes. Many people use Shawn Michaels' autobiography as a source about the Screwjob, but as someone said, the most controversial thing about the autobiography is "whether it belongs in the fiction section".
  • Bret Hart gets quite a bit of the mis-blame as well. Contrary to popular belief, he was booked for another month of TV and house shows following Montreal, as well as having permission from WCW head Eric Bischoff to work the next pay-per-view in order to drop the title and finish up business in the WWF. His refusal to drop the title to Michaels was only after Shawn made it clear he wasn't losing to Bret under any circumstances. Stories of him taking the WWF title belt to WCW are equally ludicrous; the two previous incidents of this happening (one with Ric Flair, and one with woman wrestler Madusa) both ended up in nasty lawsuits, and hindsight shows WCW had no plans for the unbeaten WWF champion when he did in fact arrive.
• WWE caught a lot of flack for releasing Marty Jannetty just days after signing him in 2006. Jannetty had to go onto his blog and insist WWE was not at fault and had no choice but to let him go after both sides discovered his probation prevented him from meeting their travel demands.
• The fall of extremely popular Diva Mickie James in WWE is a whole mix of Misblame, Fan Dumb and Completely Missing the Point. The "Piggie James" feud with Michelle Mccool (which was meant to make Mickie sympathetic), followed by James dropping the Women's title two weeks after winning it at Royal Rumble and her subsequent release led to fans immediately accusing WWE of burying a talented wrestler they thought was too fat in favor of a rail-thin blonde who was dating the Undertaker. In a 2010 interview after her release, James revealed that she didn't have a problem with the angle itself.
• If Ring of Hell is to be believed, Triple H was responsible for Stone Cold Steve Austin's 2001 heel turn after Wrestlemania X-Seven. According to Austin's autobiography, The Stone Cold Truth, Austin wanted to turn heel to refresh his character.
• Jeff Hardy and Sting's infamious match at Victory Road has drawn a lot of flack to TNA for allowing Jeff to go out in his condition (he was drugged to the point he could barely walk). In reality, while they might be blamed for pushing a known substance abuser, it was Jeff who had shown up drugged-out state far too late for TNA to do anything about it. They had to do something or they'd have to cancel the main event of the PPV.

Sports

• The description for Type 5 of misblamed is also known as "Quarterback Syndrome", because a lot of mistakes (such as a bad play, a poorly executed play, etc) are automatically blamed on the Quarterback of American Football teams. When really, sometimes it isn't their fault - at all.
  • And if it's not the quarterback, it's usually the head coach. Which is slightly more accurate, usually, but none but the most egotistical of them are in charge of choosing their teams (except in college football, of course).
  • A good example is when Tennessee Titans back-up quarterback Kerry Collins was hugely blamed for the team's abysmal blunder against the New England Patriots in 2009 (the one with the 59-0 score), though mostly from people who only watched snippets from ESPN, and only spotted his -7 passing yards. For those who actually watched the entire game, it told a different story. Although it's true that Collins didn't play his best, he certainly fared much better than the receivers he threw the ball to. His best passes often resulted in a no gain, yard loss or a drop, or only inched forward with maybe a yard or two gain. Worst of all, Collins tossed the ball to one receiver, who idiotically backpedaled twenty two yards to avoid getting tackled, but failed anyway and resulted in a huge yard lossage. Unfortunately, the ESPN replay didn't note this, so everyone thought Collins caused the suckage when it was multiple factors that caused the horrific loss (like god awful defense and special teams, being a couple others).
• Of course, it also works the other way. Tim Tebow is fast becoming the biggest example of Quarterback Syndrome in reverse, getting every single bit of credit for the Denver Broncos 2011 turnaround. When the Broncos defense intercepts the opposing quarterback's pass in his own territory near the end of the game, leading to the Broncos kicker getting an easy game-winning field goal, and everyone says "Tebow does it again!" it's gotten pretty ridiculous.
• Fran Tarkenton, a quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings from the 70s, is often known as the "quarterback who lost four Superbowls". Actually, the Vikings first Superbowl loss was with Joe Kapp at the helm. Similarly, John Elway was known as being a quarterback who lost four Superbowls, when the Broncos first loss was with Craig Morton at the helm.
• Don't mention Don Denkinger in St. Louis. The former Major League umpire is blamed for the Cardinals losing the 1985 World Series due to his blown call at first base in the ninth inning of Game Six. This ignores that 1) the Cards had a three games to one lead over the Royals and scored only two runs in the last three games, 2) They made three defensive mistakes after the call that all contributed to the loss, and 3) They were more focused on blaming Denkinger than trying to win Game Seven, which the Royals won 11-0.
• The 1986 World Series would produce its own epic case of misblame, one which has become entrenched in baseball lore. In game 6 of the series, the New York Mets would come back in extra innings, scoring the winning run of that game when first baseman Bill Buckner made an error and his glove missed a ground ball hit between his legs. The Mets promptly won game 7 and became champions, prolonging the legendary agony of the Red Sox. Easy case for blaming Buckner, right? Not so much. Those who do conveniently ignore the fact that Boston's bullpen had already blown two leads before the error occurred, with Boston having lost a 3-2 lead in regular innings and a 5-3 lead in the 10th before Buckner's error. The situation in the 10th is particularly notable, since it happened despite the fact that when the Mets rally started they had 2 outs and no baserunners, and just about everyone except the Mets players themselves had conceded defeat. (The TV crew had already announced one Red Sox player the player of the game and named another Sox player MVP for the series, the message board in the Mets stadium briefly displayed a message congratulating the Red Sox on their victory, etc.) Boston relievers then gave up three hits in a row and pitcher Bob Stanley allowed the Mets to tie the game by throwing a wild pitch nowhere near target that let the tying run score and the winning run to move to third base. On top of that, Buckner (who was nearing the end of his long career) had injured knees that should have kept him out of game, except that Boston manager John McNamara insisted on Buckner playing so he could take part in the victory. Last but not least, Buckner had to play the ball far behind first base, and it is highly doubtful that he could have beaten the speedy basrunner Mookie Wilson (who held the Mets team record for stolen bases until 2008) to the bag even if his knees were healthy. And even with the loss Boston still had Game 7 to work with. Epic misblame.
• The ESPN Classic series "Top Five Reasons You Can't Blame" was devoted to this trope, listing some of the most infamous moments in sports and giving reasons why the blame shouldn't solely go to the one person (or group) that took all the heat. Denkinger and Buckner, as described above, are just two incidents the show covered.
• College basketball fans, sportswriters and TV commentators all grossly overestimate the importance of the RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) ranking in the NCAA's selection procedure for its annual basketball tournament. Several websites exist solely to replicate the RPI (since the NCAA doesn't release it publicly). Every year there are complaints about teams with a high RPI being left out or teams with a low RPI making the field, all concluding that the RPI is deeply flawed and the NCAA should get rid of it. But the NCAA has always said that the RPI is just meant as a simple table to compare teams early on in the process, and that their decisions ultimately come down to who the team in question beat and who they lost to.
• Real Madrid president Florentino Perez has been criticised a lot lately for paying roughly 100 million euros to Manchester United for the transfer of a single player, Cristiano Ronaldo, especially because it happened in the middle of the current worldwide economic crisis. The reason behind is a totally retarded contract signed last year by the previous president, Ramón Calderón, which stipulated both the 100 million price and that if either of the parties chose to ignore the contract, they would have to pay 30 million to the other. So either United would have to pay Real 30 million for retaining their star player (which they weren't going to do since he had already decided to leave the club), or Real would have to pay United 30 million for absolutely nothing.
• Watching ESPN's documentary, Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL? the answer to the titular question would seem to be "Donald Trump." While Trump, as owner of the New Jersey Generals, started a bidding war with the NFL over college players (one that most USFL owners didn't have the resources to compete in), the real downfall of the league - the disastrous decision to move from spring to fall and compete directly with the NFL - couldn't have been done without a consensus of owners going along with Trump. Much like the Vince Russo entries above, it's unfair to say he single-handedly destroyed the league. Though Trump doesn't help his own cause by defending everything he did as "the right thing to do" and accepting none of the blame for the USFL's swift and epic collapse.
• Losing The World Cup can lead to the fifth case. In Brazil, there are four known scapegoats:
  • Barbosa, the goalkeeper in 1950 - where they lost the finals to Uruguay in Rio de Janeiro. He's famously quoted as: "The biggest penalty for a crime is 30 years. I'm currently paying 43 for a crime I didn't commit!"
  • Toninho Cerezo, whose defensive mistake led to Italy's second goal in their 3-2 victory in 1982 (a simple draw would have put Brazil into the semi-finals, but the second goal turned the tide toward Italy).
  • Zico, who missed a penalty against France in the quarter-finals in 1986. The game ended up 1-1, with an eventual French victory in the penalty shootout.
  • In 2006, while Zidane was taking a free kick, Roberto Carlos was adjusting his sock. Thierry Henry passed behind him and scored France's victory goal.
• Goalkeeper Tommy Salo was blamed for Sweden's 3-4 loss in the quarterfinals against Belarus in the 2002 Olympic hockey tournament. While he can be blamed for the endlessly replayed final goal, the coach pointed out that it wasn't Salo's fault that a Swedish team full of NHL pros only scored three goals (out of 47 shots!) on a minor team like Belarus.
• The Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989, when several Liverpool soccer fans were crushed to death in the standing pens at an FA Cup game (for those who are confused, in those days most soccer stadiums had lower levels with no seats that were enclosed by cage pens). Immediately after the disaster, The Sun published a front page story stating the fans themselves were to blame, intentionally overcrowding the pens and then attacking policemen after the cages broke and they spilled onto the field. It turned out that there was no security to inform and direct fans to the less crowded pens, the police actually prevented ambulances from entering the stadium after the fence broke, and the fans were trying to shuttle the injured out to the ambulances (which the police also prevented). Furthermore, stories about fans attacking police officers attempting to tend to the injured were outright fabrications. The Sun is still boycotted in Liverpool to this day.
• For most people, the Buffalo Bills' loss at Super Bowl XXV is summed up with two words: "Wide Right". Here are other reasons the Bills lost to the Giants: The Bills were outcoached by the New York Giants, which had the likes of Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin (both who would become successful coaches in their own right), the Giants having the longest ball possession time in Super Bowl history (40:33), Belichick's game plan which muzzled the Bills' "K-Gun" no-huddle offense, and as for Scott Norwood, it was a 47-yard field goal on grass, and he was not good at kicking field goals on grass.
• While Americans have not taken Association Football as a spectator sport well, they are often blamed for creating the word Soccer, an alternative word for the sport which is a colloquial abbreviation of association (from assoc.). However the word was actually coined by Charles Wreford Brown, an Oxford student (in England) said to have been fond of shortened forms such as "brekkers" for breakfast and "rugger" for rugby football; and back in the day was used by rich folk to distinguish Association Football from Rugby. When the sport arrived in the US in the late 19th century, it was called Association Football (and was surprisingly quite a popular sport at the time) until after World War II; mainly due to the popularity of American Football, and the word Soccer was adopted to differentiate with the two footballs. However since then, soccer's popularity in the US would fall into obscurity until recently, due in thanks to "soccer war" between the country's major league organization and FIFA. This sport's naming has also reigned true in some other countries like Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand; who have adopted or invented another football code, either as their "main" football or alongside Association Football. However, the British has since grown to hate this word, and have been hell bent on lambasting the US for it, never minding that the word came from the same place the modern rules of the game were made, the latter fact the British embrace and the former fact the British will often deny.

Tabletop Games

• The "Roving Mauler" Dungeons & Dragons monster gets a lot of "what drug were they on" reactions from its appearance. Said appearance is lifted from the demon Buer, who goes all the way back to the 16th century. Really, this just raises the question of what drug were they on in the 16th century?
• Head designer Mark Rosewater is often blamed for many things the players hate about Magic: The Gathering, even things that he had nothing to do with. And indeed, even things that have absolutely nothing to do with his department - as the face and voice of the company, he's just the one chosen to announce such things, leading many players to blame him for the decisions he likely had no say it whatsoever... Then again, many other things are entirely his fault.

Video Games

• This happens all the time, with people assuming that publishers were the ones who made the game, often ignoring the people who actually made it. Apparently, Square Enix is responsible for the remake of Lufia II, despite that Neverland, the developer of the series, was the one working on it -- Square Enix is only publishing it in Japan (with Natsume, the same company that localized the original version, handling localization) and funding it. Also, Square Enix gets yelled at for publishing Modern Warfare 2 in Japan, with people saying it would be tainted with girly men—game publishing does NOT WORK THAT WAY!!
  • This can extend to consoles too. For example, Sony may get the blame if a game ported from the PC looks terrible on the Playstation... nevermind the fact that the conversion is handled by and the responsibility of the company that made the game, and Sony has nothing to do with it 99.9% of the time. (At least the reverse is fairly rare. People have largely stopped blaming Microsoft and/or Bill Gates for everything that goes wrong vaguely involving Windows.)
• As it turns out, Superman 64 's glaring faults and ridiculous storyline were mandated by the licence holders, meaning that most of the errors Weren't Titus's Fault, as shown by ProtonJon's LP (opening of level 4)
• The English translation of Castlevania II for the NES is almost infamous for its poor translation, like blatant in-game lies supposedly meant to tell you what your next goal is, how to reach that goal, and other such game-critical information. For years, fans thought the translation was to blame, but the original version was actually just as incomprehensible.
  • Yes, even the infamous "graveyard duck" is not a mistranslation. As pointed out in a comment on the GameSpite blog, the corresponding line in the Japanese version uses the word "ahiru", which can only refer to the bird.
  • The apparent idea behind the quotes in the Japanese version was that all the villagers were liars - That is to say, they all said false things that players were supposed to realise were silly. However, when you have no other clues or information to go by, not to mention a lack of grammatical context in such small text boxes, both Japanese and English audiences started to wonder why the game was telling you to shout in front of a church to restore health instead of just going inside to heal. In fact, given that the Famicom controller had a microphone built into it, the Japanese probably had it worse...
    • • Some of the townsfolk tell you things like what Dracula's rib does or where you can find some of the thirteen "scriptures" which explain what to do at the impassable cliffs and lakes etc. One villager tells you how to get through the poison marsh, another that you must get the cross at Laruba's Mansion... Not everything is useless or lies, and the manual does warn you that some of it is. Talking to some of the townspeople is also necessary in order to find out which ones sell you items. The dialogue sets the tone for the atmosphere and type of people you encounter in each town, deepening the game, and some of the utterances are quite funny, adding to the entertainment value. Also you know you're getting nearer the end when the townsfolk are more scared in the towns you come across, which is a useful clue and adds to the ambience as well.
• Many people are angered by the fact that Bahamut was portrayed as a dragon in games like Final Fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons. And yet for some reason, the blame seems to fall solely on Final Fantasy for making people think this. Actually blaming Dungeons & Dragons, which has been doing it longer and far more than Final Fantasy ever did is a mortal sin because this was 1st edition of advanced dungeons and dragons when Bahamut was introduced as a dragon based off of arabic mythology. (Surprisingly people will credit this as starting the Beholder trend showing that they at least looked inside the manual.)
  • Another interesting thing is that despite how common Bahamut appears in the games, his role is rather limited. There have never really been any stories centered around any character, and he's mostly been a summon. Dungeons & Dragons is more to blame for making Bahamut appear to be a character, listing rules for playing him or using him in campaigns.
  • A lot of things in Final Fantasy I were based off things in Dungeons & Dragons, at least at the start. Bahamut was one of those things. So they probably got the idea from D&D anyway.
• When Tales of Phantasia finally got an official English release, many people complained about various edits and changes made to the game script. Actually, many of the differences were a result of an earlier Fan Translation by DeJap of the SNES version being less faithful to the original than the official GBA version. Of course, there still that thing about "Ragnarok" becoming "Kangaroo" (as well as generally being a pretty bland localization), but despite what anyone says that's pretty much the only outright mistake.
• The German version of Final Fantasy X (which was the Updated Rerelease to boot) was translated from the original Japanese version, omitting most of the changes the US version made. Unfortunately, they threw in the English voice overs instead of the Japanese ones. This triggered one of the most infamous flame wars over how they could subtitle Yuna's "I love you" with "Thank you", when the latter was actually what she said in the original.
  • It gets worse. Said incident was enough to convince Square Enix to, in the future, translate any and all story parts, even if they're not voiced, from the English version. And sometimes the rest of the game, to boot. Even if they were dubbed (like the Kingdom Hearts series) into German.
• Some Super Robot Wars fans get huffy over Atlus's translation of some Original Generation pilot and unit names, specifically regarding "Zengar Zonvolt" becoming "Sanger Zonvolt" and his Infinity Plus One Mech Daizengar becoming the rather silly-looking Dy Gen Guard. These two instances actually make sense: for Sanger's name, Atlus simply left off the umlaut on Sänger, which is a German name and naturally katakana-tized as Zengar due to how it's pronounced. As for Dy Gen Guard, it's short for Dynamic General Guardian. The whole Daizengar ("Great Sänger") bit was an intentional pun, again due to Japanese pronunciation. Atlus's only fault in this was being lazy with their accent marks.
  • "Latooni Subota", on the other hand, probably ought to be Latune Cybota to stay faithful to typical Cyrillic transliteration (she's Russian. Ish.) Basically, Atlus is perfectly faithful to Japanese. It's European languages that they half-ass.
  • Meanwhile, strange Romanizations like the name of the Hagane Hagwane were preserved in the official sub of the anime at Bandai's insistence, as was a lengthy joke in the game Original Generation 2 that no longer makes sense when the names are pronounced in the English way. These could be considered cases of Executive Meddling where a translation was too faithful to the original work.
• Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World was yelled at by fans who complained about how "they took the wimpy way out with the bad ending" and instead of Marta killing herself, she just writes a sad letter. Marta didn't commit suicide, that was a mistranslation...but the Heroic Sacrifice of Emil was still there, as was Marta's Disney Death, and her Tear Jerker cry of EEMMMMIIIIIIIIIILLLLL!!!!
• Zelda II the Adventure of Link features a strange man in a house in Ruto who, when spoken to, says the bizarre phrase "I AM ERROR". It turns out that Error is his actual name, and was spelled phonetically in Japanese; if you talk to another character in Mido, he tells Link to ask Error about how to find the secret entrance to the Island Palace in the graveyard. There's another guy in the game named Bug, but the translators apparently misinterpreted this and translated his name "Bagu" directly from the katakana.
• Everyone wants their favourite games to be released on the Virtual Console. (Especially given that some of the old consoles may have been damaged, games take damage too, etc.) But because the virtual console doesn't have every game made prior to the Dreamcast-Game Cube era, supposedly, this is the fault of Nintendo. Nintendo was not actually responsible for every game released on their systems, not to mention, many of the systems with games available on the Virtual console weren't even made by Nintendo in the first place! While Nintendo did have some of the games they made and/or published on the virtual console, Nintendo still gets people angry at them for not having their favourite game on the virtual console, when Nintendo may not have had that much to do with the creation of that game outside of licensing it. (If it was on a Nintendo system...)
  • Some games on Nintendo's earlier systems were even released by companies that are now Nintendo's competitors. Rare (which is now owned by Microsoft) and Sony were both third-party developers on the NES and SNES.
• Many fans believe that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was created as an American replacement for Final Fantasy V, which has helped contribute to the unfortunate amounts of hate for Mystic Quest. In truth, the decision not to translate Final Fantasy V was completely unrelated to the creation of Mystic Quest.
• Similarly, Square's Secret of Evermore is often despised by fans who believe the urban legend that the US got it instead of Secret of Mana 2. In fact, the development of one had nothing to do with the other. It turns out that the US got Chrono Trigger instead of SoM2.
• And speaking of Square, regardless of your opinions on their output, a lot of people seem to believe that artist Tetsuya Nomura not only does 100% character designs, but literally does everything at Square Enix. He is often blamed for character designs on titles he's not involved in, accused of programming decisions, and sometimes even marketing. For the record, he doesn't actually do much for Final Fantasy outside of designs and debugging, and actually didn't serve as a character designer for IX, XI, or XII. (All of which we're told "were all Nomura's".) He also only directs the Kingdom Hearts series, got a side project out of The World Ends With You, and his first effort as a director for the Final Fantasy series is Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is ironically being lauded by many of his detractors as a creative, fresh new direction for the series, unlike that other "Nomura anime crap".
  • And not to mention, let's not forget that people seem to think he only came around in Final Fantasy VII. Despite somehow coming in Final Fantasy VII...he was a debugger in IV, monster designer in V, and actually designed several characters in VI. This leads to a inversion of this, as people always assume Amano designed every character in games I-IV, and complain about Nomura redesigning Setzer for Kingdom Hearts II because he was an Amano character—while Setzer was actually one of the VI characters that he designed. How 'DARE Nomura redesign his own character?! The BASTARD! (Vivi was the character he had qualms with using - because Nomura didn't even work on IX)
    • These kids seem to want MORE of Nomura's redesigns on characters he didn't create.
  • He's also blamed 100% for any story issues with the Kingdom Hearts series, due to his role as director. The other people who have helped write the story for the games (Jun Akiyama, Daisuke Watanabe, Kazushige Nojima, Masaru Oka, Tomoco Kanemaki, etc.) are forgotten.
    • Nomura is also frequently made a target whenever a Final Mix game is released. While he has gone on record for saying that he believes Final Mix is exclusive to Japan, it's more than just his decision to make it so. The boards at Square Enix don't let any (except for a few) Updated Rerelease game come out of Japan, because they believe that it would not be profitable to do so. Despite a petition for Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+ to be released internationally showing otherwise. Sony, the makers of the PlayStation 2, also have a strict rule against re-releases. They have to have a certain amount of new content before they are allowed to be released. In short, Nomura is only the director of the games, he alone cannot decide whether or not to release them internationally. And he has also said he'd like to release something like Final Mix internationally, but his hands are tied by the system he works in.
    • Re: the above, the whole reason for the Updated Release games in the first place is to keep Japanese fans from picking up cheaper imported versions of the same game. They would be fucking themselves if they released them outside Japan.
  • The Hate Dumb hasn't stopped there, either. Final Fantasy XIII's Hatedom has been screaming at stuff that Nomura had absolutely no part in. Yes, he designed the characters for Final Fantasy XIII...but did you know that he's not even the sole artist for that game? Take one look at the credits. You know...those bits of scrolling text at the end most people typically flat out ignore unless they wanna see the actors? If you took one look at the credits, you'd probably be surprised at how little Nomura actually does.
    • Slight mistatement: He gets blamed for anything the person doesn't like. No complaints about the gameplay of Dissidia, no mention of Nomura. But if someone doesn't like Cloud of Darkness's new "stripperrific" appearance, don't expect them to have went to Google and found out that it was actually the original, unused design for her.
  • He hasn't helped with a lot of this by somehow managing to have misblamed himself in various interviews before now, though.
• There is/was a lot of confusion around Tactics Ogre. No, it was not a ripoff of Final Fantasy Tactics. The latter was actually a Spiritual Successor to Tactics Ogre. Yes, it was made by many of the same people. Yes, Square-Enix localized the Enhanced Remake on the PlayStation Portable. No, Square-Enix did not localize the game on the Playstation - The mediocre translation full of typos and grammatical errors was actually done by none other than Atlus, since Square had not officially bought Quest, yet.
• Already in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. There was a change in a scene: Where the Wicked Queen made the mirror attack Terra. In the Japanese version, she shouted at it and her anger possessed the mirror, whereas in the other versions, she throws a potion (off-screen) and that makes the mirror become angry. This may actually be explainable...even when people were showing off the Japanese version on YouTube, 3/5 out of every comment on that Japanese scene was "Wow, she sounds constipated" or "Boy, she sounds like she has to take a dump, doesn't she?" still this hasn't stopped people from assuming they censored a mirror breaking.
  • While they made the scopes on the Braig fight look more fantastical and didn't show him fusing his gun into a sniper rifle...of all things, the part where you see Braig's bloody cheek was left intact. People already anticipated that scene to have been censored. (Thankfully not his eye damage)
• The "laughing scene" in Final Fantasy X, in which Tidus and Yuna laugh like crazy people, is often held up as an example of terrible English dubbing because they sounded "fake". In fact, not only do they sound just as fake and over the top in the Japanese version, this was the entire point of the laughing scene (specifically, to show that Tidus, at that point in the game, can't feign happiness very well.) Note both of the characters laughing (normally) at how ridiculous they sound a second later, and the characters besides Tidus and Yuna stating they thought they'd gone out of their minds.
  • Similarly, a number of people complained about the opening song in Final Fantasy X-2, calling it "Britney Spears pop bullshit" and demanding what was no doubt a vastly superior original Japanese version, instead of the bubblegum crap no doubt foisted on the game by stodgy American suits. The Japanese version is... exactly the same. The music is the same, the lyrics are as unchanged as possible while still managing to match the beat and rhyme, and they even selected a female vocalist whose voice was largely similar.
• While Capcom does have a well-earned reputation for bad translations of games in the nineties, they are sometimes blamed for some they didn't do. In the case of the Breath of Fire series, they are often accused of creating an Inconsistent Dub due to certain names in the first game being altered in later entries. This was actually the result of the first game being localized in the US by Squaresoft, who changed names with little rhyme or reason. The later games were handled by Capcom and they usually reverted to the Japanese names in future titles.
  • More specifically, Capcom USA has been the subject of a lot of heat for "their" English translations of the company's Japanese-developed games, which typically mangle not only the dialogue but also the plot canon for some games, Street Fighter in particular. A recent revelation from a Capcom USA vice-president, however, reveals that it is Capcom's Japanese division that is responsible for the botched English translations that made their way overseas for years. Which begs the question of why a Japanese company would mix-up the translation of dialogue and plot written in their native language just for outsiders.
    • One has to consider that some of the Street Fighter games from the mid-to-late 1990's had American staff members working on them, so they had more input. However, most of the quotes and endings in the games, while a bit embellished sometimes (Guile never mentions Cambodia in the Japanese version), had mostly accurate translations. Endings that were truly different, like Cammy's and Fei-Long's, were often the exceptions rather than the rule.
  • Similarly, when Capcom and Keiji Inafune began feuding, blame was laid 100% at the door of Capcom, with everyone rushing to proclaim them as being pure evil and Inafune as being a poor put-upon Woobie who needed our help. The ensuing Mighty No. 9 debacle soon proved that Inafune, left to his own devices, apparently can't make good hiring decisions, or manage a team properly, or budget properly, nor is he quite so capable at producing a fun and good-looking game anymore, leading one to wonder if perhaps Capcom had some good reasons to be ticked at him.
• There are plenty of forums in which people say Squaresoft/Square Enix made Legend of Dragoon or Legend of Legaia. Err...they had about as much to do with those franchises as Tim Burton had with Coraline. That is, nothing. Legend of Dragoon and Legend of Legaia were all Sony.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the NES port of Metal Gear involved him complaining about butchery of a 'great game'. Among the features he complained about were the fact that you can't open a door and wear your gas mask at the same time, forcing you to sacrifice some health when you enter or leave a gassy room, which was a design flaw of the original game fixed in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (and even in Snake's Revenge). He also complained about Big Boss prefacing his misleading hints with the phrase 'I forgot to tell you...', claming it was a terrible translation - not only was this a better translation than the one in the European MSX version of the game, but Big Boss's hints really were supposed to be useless and annoying for plot reasons, similar to the Castlevania "graveyard duck".
  • A smaller case comes when he reviewed a Japan-only Famicom Transformers game and is pissed that after you beat Megatron there's another boss that comes from nowhere and isn't even an actual Decepticon (and their general absence as bosses, including fight a Decepticon symbol 'three times), which he calls MechaGodzilla. However, that really was a Decepticon, namely Trypticon. Apparently, the manual advertised you would fight "the largest Decepticon ever", and since Trypticon is a "city-bot" and a Base On Legs they technically delivered (even though in the actual game it's barely bigger than Megatron).
    • You are aware that was a joke right?
• Again, one of the many complaints lodged against Snake's Revenge: Metal Gear II is that the translation tells you the opposite of what you have to do during the train level ("THERE IS NO TRAP ON THE TRAIN" has become a semi-meme). Of course, the sequence was a deliberate callback to Metal Gear since it happens immediately before the person giving you the hints turns out to be a spy trying to make you fail, who you then fight in a boss battle.
  • Also, a lot of Metal Gear fans who never actually play the NES version of the game accuse it of having a silly plot in comparison to the "serious" storyline in the original MSX version, replacing the original Big Bad of Big Boss, an American soldier turned renegade mercenary, with Vermon CaTaffy, a pastiche of real-life terrorist Muammar al-Gaddafi. In truth, Konami's American manuals back in the day tended to feature weird plot changes (as evident by the American manuals for the early Castlevania, Contra, and Gradius games) that thankfully did not affect the games themselves. The NES version of Metal Gear, despite its Blind Idiot Translation quality, is almost identical to the MSX version in terms of plot aside for a few minor differences and Big Boss is still the Big Bad in the NES version. The non-canon Snake's Revenge also featured a similar discrepancy between the game and its manual, with the manual identifying the bad guy as Higharolla Kockamamie (another pastiche, this time of Ayatollah Khomeini), but the actual villain of the game is revealed to be a Cyborg Big Boss.
• Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes often gets a lot of scorn for its cutscenes, most of the blame is directed towards Ryuhei Kitimura, who directed the scenes. However, every scene that Kitimura included was approved by Hideo Kojima, and Kitimura was chosen specifically for his over-the-top nature.
• Continuing on with Metal Gear, for a case of character misblaming, whenever anyone brings up why Metal Gear Solid 2 was the weakest in the series, it is always attributed to one thing - Raiden. While Raiden's involvement does weaken things considerably, the shameless backtracking, lack of great boss fights and ditching of any sense of coherence all had nothing to do with him.
• Many people who played the fan-translated version of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake assumed that the name of the enemy boss "Black Color", a misromanization of "Blackcollar", was a mistake by the fan-translators. In reality, that's how it was spelled in the actual Japanese version (all of the bosses' names in the game were written in roman script).
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 also gets a lot of blame for its rather absurd storyline placed on the translator/localizer, Agness Kaku. As this interview reveals, saying that Konami was very unhelpful with regards to translation and localization is a huge understatement.
• Yes, there are people who believe that Final Fantasy or Square-Enix is literally responsible for every game that comes out of Japan. Telephone for you. It's The Research Department. They Say You made a Critical Research Failure on top of a major Misblame.
• Electronic Arts receives a lot of flak for their exclusive license to make games with National Football League players and teams, with many gamers believing that EA simply threw a lot of money at the NFL to get the license. In fact, the NFL took bids from a number of video game companies before awarding the contract to EA. Gamers, however, deny this, believing that the league would never willingly enter such anti-competitive agreements - never mind that the NFL's own actions in regards to television distribution and apparel licensing indicates that they not only willingly agree to, but also encourage these kinds of licensing deals.
  • EA still may not be totally blameless in this area, as their similarly exclusive deals with the NCAA and Arena Football League seem to indicate they have no problem pursuing exclusive rights (these and the NFL deal are all part of a California-based class action suit against the company). Of course, it may be possible that the AFL and NCAA simply follow the same hardball tactics as the NFL.
  • And let's not even get started on the fans of BioWare games who are convinced that any "dumbing down" of RPG mechanics or DLC offers are all the nefarious influence of EA having bought them, and might not just be BioWare themselves trying to streamline their games and give the players more content that might not have been available otherwise.
  • EA in general catches a lot of flack for "ruining" companies they buy up, but in many cases, prior to the purchase said companies weren't all that profitable, and in some cases they couldn't do what they did without EA's money. Full Motion Video Wing Commander and Ultima Online were feasible only with financial support from EA, as Origin prior to being bought by EA^[6] was, at best, "holding on", financially, in spite of the critical acclaim of their games.
    • Also funny, take a look at the publisher for System Shock 2. Notice anything? Yep. EA. Guess whose idea it was to make it a sequel to System Shock? EA. Accentuate the Negative at its finest.
  • They are often criticized for releasing essentially the same Madden game with updated rosters year after year. While this is arguably true, football itself doesn't really change from year to year.
• It's common knowledge that the game released as Final Fantasy Adventure in America was in fact known as Seiken Densetsu in Japan, and was the first entry in what's now known as the Mana series in America. It's also "common knowledge" that the name was only given the Final Fantasy title in America to make it more marketable. Except that the game's Japanese name was actually Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden. All the localization really did to the name was drop the subtitle (or is it "supertitle"?) and change "Sidestory" into "Adventure".
  • Since Final Fantasy Adventure contains Moogles, chocobos, an airship, the four elemental Fiends, main villains who's visual designs are BOTH based off Garland (both his overworld and his battle screen sprite, which in FF 1 looked radically different from each other) and one NPC that looks a lot like a Red Mage, either this is a Final Fantasy game or the designers changed a lot more than just the title.
• 80's elitists of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are angry at Ubisoft for not including any 80's cartoon characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up. The truth is, the people at Mirage Studios specifically told Ubisoft to stick to the 2003 series as the basis for the game.
• Some people thought that Loom was uncompleted for several reasons...either a), They Just Didn't Care for it because Star Wars games made more money, or b) nobody bought it. The actual reason for not finishing Loom is way different. No, Lucas Arts didn't abandon it in favour of Star Wars...this was in the early 90s when point and click adventure games (Similar to Loom) were all the rage and cash cows, especially when the Nostalgia Filter kicked in about 10 years later. And the sale figures certainly were not showing lack of a public interest...Even one of the developers said it wasn't. Loom sold over 500,000 copies at the time of the interview. (At a time when that was impressive) But why was there no Loom 2: Forge despite that Lucas Arts would only benefit from another one, and fans would support it? The Developers all got caught-up in different projects.
• The Circle of Eight mod for Temple of Elemental Evil is paned for including a Buster Sword. The sword model was in the core game, used by a bugged sword that can only be accessed by console.
• While it is true that MLB, NFL, and the other leagues forced Backyard Sports to keep going, some reviewers put the blame on the leagues for making the series Jump the Shark by taking the games in a different direction. It wasn't even Atari, the publishing company, who did it. The real culprit is Humongous, Inc., a company formed out of the last remnants of Humongous Entertainment (who started the series); an employee said so in an interview.
• Yahtzee is guilty of this in his review for The Conduit. He blamed all his issues with the game, such as the default control scheme on Nintendo - when they didn't even make the game in the first place!
  • He also made this mistake in reverse in his Metroid: Other M review. He blamed Team Ninja rather than Nintendo, who were responsible for everything he criticized.
• Valve was complained at for breaking a promise to release something for Team Fortress 2 on November 11, 2009, which was also Veteran's Day. Only Valve never even hinted at the possibility of anything being released anytime that week. People started thinking Valve was going to do something, and people jumped on the bandwagon because, if this many people think something is coming, Valve MUST have said something about it.
  • Left 4 Dead and its sequel caused a ton of backlash among its fans. When Left 4 Dead 2 was made and released, people whined that Valve "broke its promise" of supporting Left 4 Dead 1 and how almost everything the sequel had should have been in the first game. What people fail to realize is that Left 4 Dead 1 is simply not balanced for L4D2's features (Most of the maps in the first game are narrow and small, which would make it heaven for Spitters and Chargers. Weapons like the Grenade Launcher and Chainsaw are also not suited for the close quarters style L4D1 had). Along with that, to add another batch of 25+ maps and new characters with dialogue would start to get close to download sizes matching a full game. Many people also assume that since L4D2 is out and Valve is making a DLC campaign that has the old survivors meet the new ones in the sequel, L4D1 is now dead. Keep in mind that L4D1 is only a year old and Valve has a history of still updating their older games when the sequels for them have come out.
    • And to further prove this point, The Sacrifice DLC came out for L4D1 as well as the sequel in order to please both fan bases. Of course, this still backfired since the sequel also got a port of No Mercy, a campaign from the first game and people are now crying that Valve is trying to kill off L4D1, even though they have been updating the game with patches and other features.
  • The Cold Stream DLC had been delayed for several months, causing Xbox 360 players to blame Valve for delaying the DLC for so long and demand that they should be allowed to help in testing the beta for free or release the DLC for free. Valve isn't entirely at fault, but the rest of the blame falls on Microsoft. Not only Valve has to make sure Cold Stream can run on the Xbox 360 without trouble, but Microsoft's DLC policies prevent Valve from giving Xbox 360 owners constant updates for a beta product and it is Microsoft that determines the pricing for DLC, not Valve.
• The fact that Conker's Bad Fur Day (amongst other demanded games) isn't on the Wii's Virtual Console seems to lead to people pointing fingers at Nintendo. One would honestly think that fans would actually be bothered to look at the developer and publishers for the Nintendo 64 game...Rare. Sure, they were second-party at the time of Conker's Bad Fur Day, but since 2002, they were actually bought out by Microsoft (Which is why there is a Conker game on the Xbox, not to mention Kameo and Perfect Dark. Nintendo had no or negligible involvement with Conker's Bad Fur Day, and they likely won't be able to put it on without getting legal permission to do so from Microsoft.
  • And to make matters worse, some people actually said Nintendo was responsible for the censorship done to the Xbox version, Conker: Live and Reloaded, with obscenities that were in the Nintendo 64 version bleeped out in the Xbox version. Gaming does not work that way; why would Nintendo be allowed to have any say over something released on a competitor's system, the original version of which they never even worked on or published?
  • This is also the reason why Golden Eye 1997 isn't on the Virtual Console. Not that it's necessary.
    • Comming back to Rare now being owned by Microsoft, it should also be pointed out that Rare's N64 games are available on Xbox Live Arcade instead.
• Some people seem to think that Mallow and Geno, characters from Super Mario RPG should have been in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that Nintendo was stupid for not licensing them and instead using "X retarded character" (R.O.B. being the favorite target). This would probably have had some merit...had they actually been owned by Nintendo. They were, like Super Mario RPG, created by Squaresoft (now Square Enix). Even when Geno made a Cameo appearance in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, they stated that Geno was copyright Square Enix.
  • Being owned by another company didn't stop Sonic and Snake from appearing in Brawl under license, nor Square Enix's Cloud Strife in For.
  • In a similar method, Chrono Trigger's Fan Dumb is angered upon several things... one was that apparently, the DS translation was less faithful to the original. Maybe the Super NES, but it's actually closer to the Japanese Script... namely Frog didn't speak in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe when absolutely nobody else in that time frame did so. And another was that it wasn't on the Virtual Console... Apparently, Square Enix wouldn't have a say at all about what games were released on there, despite making it.
• A variation/mixture of types 3 and 4 happened with Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier. A different company was responsible for developing it, which is why it (the plot, mostly) gained so much ire from the fans. However, if one would take time to watch the credits, one would find that those responsible for the story were the series's original creators.
• Shigeru Miyamoto (Yes, even him) is blamed for the lack of Donkey Kong Country characters in Jungle Beat and the general sorry state of the franchise based on an old interview where he bashed the first DKC. That despite that he later apologized for the outburst in a later interview, saying that Executive Meddling pressured him into putting 3D graphics in Yoshi's Island and that he also produced and supervised the two King of Swing games and Barrel Blast, all of which features DKC characters. For example, the Canon Discontinuity page for video games credited the infamous "DKC characters aren't fresh enough" line to him even though it was actually Yoshiaki Koizumi (one of Jungle Beat's two director) who said that.
  • As if all the prior evidence wasn't enough, after the reveal of Donkey Kong Country Returns, Miyamoto finally addressed that the idea of him hating DKC was nothing but a rumor. In fact, what he's controlled in the development of DKCR (like demanding that the music emulates the original tunes) seems to indicate that he loved it.
  • Talking of that series, a lot of people seem to misblame Rare for no Kremlings in some games (aka Donkey Kong Country Returns), mistakenly thinking Rare still owns them or something. No they don't, Kremlings and many other enemy characters have been in Konga, King of Swing, Jungle Climber, Barrel Blast and every rerelease of the original trilogy known to man, and they got sent to Nintendo with everything else in the Donkey Kong Country series. No, they just wanted a bit of a change to try something new.
• Any game that is released is treated as if the publisher actually made everything. Probably because some publishers actually do or have at least been known to make games themselves (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Square Enix, Activision, Ubisoft), any game that has their logo or name on it is assumed to have been all their doing. No matter how many logos of companies that worked on the game come up, it is automatically assumed to be "all Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/Square Enix/Namco Bandai/Ubisoft/whoever's doing". This leads to people making all sorts of accusations, such as blaming Pokémon designs on Nintendo (ignoring poor GameFreak) or saying Nomura rushed games that were made by Tri-Ace or more by former Enix employees, and Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft mysteriously being responsible for allowing EA to publish mediocre games on their consoles.
  • Pokémon is a big victim of this trope. Every time the people who stop playing after a certain generation complain of a new Pokémon design or spinoff they don't like, they blame Nintendo for designing the Pokémon, or even making the games. Uh...then what's that Game Freak Logo doing in front of nearly every mainstream Pokémon game? You know...they do MAKE the games, after all....
    • Oddly enough, Vanilluxe, a Pokémon that wasn't designed by Ken Sugimori, is sometimes considered good. Your Mileage May Vary; others often say "See? That's proof they're running out of designs by having someone else design it" like Ken Sugimori is the only one allowed to design Pokémon. (Ken can't live forever, folks.)
• A common complaint about Capcom's localization of the Ace Attorney series is the claim that despite the games being centered around murder mysteries and not shy about depicting brutal killings (including one impalement), there are frequent references to "grape juice" which appear to be an obvious Bowdlerization of wine. Oddly enough, it's grape juice in the Japanese version as well.
  • In fact, the localisers who worked on Ace Attorney have turned out some of the best work in recent years.
• LJN Toys has taken a lot of bad reaction (such as from The Angry Video Game Nerd) for the terrible video games that they've put their name on, but according to Lord Kat in his video on the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? NES game, they're not the only ones to blame for it:

"Now a lot of people associate these terrible movie-based licensed games with LJN, [but] they're just the publishers. The real criminals here are the beloved Rare. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Amazing Spider Man, Beetlejuice... In fact, if you take out the LJN component, Rare has made a lot more garbage without them. So to all you Nintendo fanboys who cream themselves over Battletoads and Donkey Kong 64, kiss my fat wide ass; Rare ruined my childhood."

• • Some of LJN's games pre-Rare were developed in Japan by a then-mostly-unknown company known as... Atlus.
• A small case... the baw plz account on Deviant ART uses a scene of a character crying from a video game. Most people actually assume that it's Sora, but anyone who has played it and remembers that Tear Jerker scene can probably tell you it's actually not Sora, but someone named Yuri, from Shadow Hearts. Mild case, but some people have been looking for a scene in which Sora's face twists into a really REALLY odd facial expression as he cries, only to not find anything.
• Xbox Live's userbase has been misblamed for the creation of the "juvenile and unfriendly" gamer. Apparently people haven't heard of the theory of GIFT, which has been in existence long before the Xbox. Live just brought the issue to light if anything.
  • And when it's not Xbox Live that gets all the criticism for this, it's always something like Counter-Strike or Quake.
  • Not to mention within Xbox Live, games like Halo and Call of Duty get the distinction of the problem child to this. Remember folks, when it comes to this, Blame the Player...or more specifically the Vocal Minority, not the Game.
  • It hasn't helped that some gamers use a No True Scotsman type fallacy that their favorite service or game (that is not any of the above) is immune to this (Playstation Network or some very hardcore PC game are common examples). For example: Griefer on Xbox Live? That's clearly all of them. Griefer on PlayStation Network? They don't represent all gamers on PSN. Remember, GIFT can happen anywhere on the internet, so don't be surprised that in any game, a Jerkass Troll will try and ruin your fun. Your best thing to do is just ignore them, leave, or kick them out.
  • Also related, anyone who thinks that the PvP in League of Legends having the screaming of X Box Live, Counter-Strike, or Quake type "Stop Having Fun!" Guys combined and cranked Up to Eleven have never played the original DotA, or have engaged in any competitive activity.
• Related to the above, whenever you mention Gold-selling in-game advertisements or gold farmers, most people often think it's exclusive to World of Warcraft, or that it actually started that practice. No, the practice didn't start in that game, it's been around since Ultima Online, for that matter, gold farming and people buying gold was present in the original EverQuest and Ragnarok Online. The only reason you hear about it in World of Warcraft so much is because the game has millions of players.
  • In fact, if you check some of the larget gold-selling websites you can see that gold selling isn't just limited to World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online had Gold spammers since day one, as did Aion Online. And on some servers of Final Fantasy XI, you almost had to buy gold. And not even RuneScape was immune to it!
• Class nerfs are always a source of utmost ire in any MMO, but among the World of Warcraft fanbase, most nerfs are usually directly blamed towards Greg "Ghostcrawler" or a few other choice devs, when in fact the changes are discussed in advance by a group of all the devs well in advance.
  • the C Ms (community managers) also get a ton of hate for said nerfs, while ghostcrawler is at least a dev, most of the C Ms are just forum moderators (trying) to keep the boards a place of intelligent discussion and not constant flaming and fighting.
• The start of Cataclysm was plagued by all sorts of bugs and glitches, among them a near ridiculous respawn rate where a mob you just killed would respawn while you were looting it or suddenly reappear attacking you while you were walking away. This was apparently Blizzard's intention; but in actuality it was a programming oversight made to avert one of the things that had happened around Burning Crusade where the mob respawn rates were actually too high and people would camp required mobs.
• Game Masters/Moderators in almost any online game tend to get blamed for every single occurrence that rubs any player the wrong way and are expected to fix every technical problem and rectify every balance issue on their own.
• The North American version of the Death Smiles Xbox 360 port got a lot of flak for having less slowdown than the Japanese versions, and some decided to point fingers at Aksys Games, who did the localization. In a forum post on the official Aksys website, an Aksys employee clarified that all of the programming for the North American version—the reduced slowdown included—was CAVE's doing.
• Tim Schafer is a Type 5 and Type 2 for Brutal Legend. Double Fine has recieved nearly all the blame for "falsely advertising" Brutal Legend and hiding the hybrid of Action and Real Time Strategy. One angry player messaged Tim Schafer directly on Twitter and called him a liar publicly. He told the complainer that was all he talked about for months. It was Electronic Arts advertising that mislead consumers (and reviewers) that it was single player focused, to the point that it drowned out the voice of Double Fine. To this day, Tim Schafer says that the reviews remain high on Metacritic, and can be divided between those who ATTEMPTED multiplayer, and those who didn't even touch it.
• Richard Garriott gets misblamed for a lot of things surrounding "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa", despite his role merely being Executive Producer. It's often claimed that he arrogantly decided to plaster his name on the box, when it was more likely a marketing decision to hype up a game that wasn't very famous and had been sitting in Development Hell for some years. He's often insulted and blamed for many of game's problems due to him going to space during the game's life. Not only did he pay for the flight with his own money, but his Executive Producer role was probably hardly missed during the trip, and the trip ended up being tied into a marketing campagin anyway, which arguably did help the game (though clearly not enough). Finally, Richard Garriott ended up suing the publisher, NC Soft themselves, after a letter of resignation came out that he claim he didn't write and was forged by them to pressure him into leaving without an investment he was due. He won the case.
• The much reviled redesign of Devil May Cry's Dante in the recently announced reboot has caused a lot fan outrage. Nearly all of it is directed at Ninja Theory (who Capcomm handed the series for said reboot's production), but Ninja Theory is only partly responsible, as the redesign was done at Capcom's request and approval. Sadly, lead designer Tameem Antoniades' response to the fans has done little to diffuse this situation.
• Team Ninja is solely blamed for how Samus' personality is and how the game is totally different from the rest of the games in the Metroid games in Metroid: Other M. Team Ninja just did the programming and combat system design. It was the co-creator of Metroid, Yoshio Sakamoto, who wanted to apply all the changes and wrote personally the scenario.
  • Similarly, critics have tended to attribute Samus' lack of emotion in her voice to Jessica Martin's poor acting skills, when it was actually Yoshio Sakamoto who specifically asked for Samus to sound robotic in order to reflect the effects her tragic past and occupation have had on her personality. Contrast the majority of the narration with the scenes where Samus gets emotional over Ian's imminent death, Ridley's appearance, and Adam's sacrifice, and you'll see that Jessica Martin's acting covers more than just Dull Surprise.
    • On the other hand, Ai Kobayashi doesn't nearly receive such a huge Internet Backdraft in the Japanese version, which most fans consider to be an appropriate approach to the character.
    • Jessica has also been redeemed by the fanbase. Namely by actually participating in it. Unfortunately, the bad stink left by the game made Nintendo lock down the actors from giving interviews about what happened.
    • Also, Team Ninja's director, despite getting alot of the blame, is in fact a Metroid fan (even contributing along side Jessica in celebrating the series' 25th Anniversary) and in an interview criticized Sakamoto, by pointing out that anyone who said something else would be more effective (most notably, they were against the controversial control scheme) were shot down instantly by him.
• Reggie, president of Nintendo of America, is a mix of type 2 and 5. Reggie is blamed for not improving the Wii's infrastructure, for withholding potentially good games for the Wii, and is also blamed for not releasing EarthBound on the virtual console. Reggie hardly has any influence over what he can do to Nintendo as a whole since the true big boss of Nintendo is the people over at Nintendo of Japan, where they can decide on what to do with the Wii and what games other regions can receive (while Reggie can have a say on whether or not consumers in his region can get a certain game, he does not have a say for every game). As for Earthbound's case, there's several works within the game that are borderline copyright infringement and is a big legal mess.
  • Not to mention, a lot of people hate on Nintendo for Mother 3 not having an international release. The results of the second game probably left a bad taste in peoples' mouths, as it was met with poor sales reception initially and didn't gain Immunity to Criticism until about 5–6 years after its release. That wasn't going to help the case. On top of the other issues such as the AC-DC riffraffs and mentions of other shows creating a legal mess, there was also the issue that it was released in 2006. By that point in time, the DS had already been established on the market and stores were phasing out new Game Boy Advance games to make more space for the DS's growing roster. (Which was also a rumour for the first game, which also would have been released for the NES at a time when the SNES was out and most people would have shelved it.) In all, it was Saved From Development Hell a tad too late.
• The late Gunpei Yokoi, famous for creating the Nintendo Game and Watch, Famicom/NES, the Game Boy/Game Boy Pocket, and the Metroid series, was solely blamed for the failure of his last Nintendo creation, the Virtual Boy. Yokoi wanted to wait until technology improved before releasing the Virtual Boy, namely the addition of color screens, but Nintendo pulled the project out of his hands and rushed the product to store shelves before it was complete, to fill the gap between the end of the SNES, and the beginnings of the Nintendo 64. After its failure, Yokoi was blamed for the entire fiasco, which partially led to his forced resignation by Nintendo.
• The translators of Okami are often blamed for the bizarre dichotomy that the manual for the game treats Amaterasu as genderless, while the actual game makes her fairly clearly female. Apparently, this was also the case in the Japanese version.
• The 4Kids voice actors were mainly trashed for the crappy scripts, story-lines and general badness of the Sonic games from 2005 to 2010. This, however, is an extremely unfair judgement seeing as how Jason Griffith and the other actors only provided the voices for these parts and never even involved in writing the stories or scripts. All they did was voice the lines they were given.
  • A key example of this the the infamous line: "It looks like being a princess isn't that easy" from Sonic 2006. Jason was trashed like hell for this god awful line. While it's true that the line wasn't well delivered, the fact that people were actually blaming the line itself on him was taking things to far.
  • Sega themselves even stated once that they blame previous voice actor of Sonic, Ryan Drummond, for the fact that fans were complaining...Seriously. That's like firing a clerk then blaming them when the replacement turns out to be crap.
  • Another example: Now retired voice actor to Tails, Amy Palant, was reported to have been sent death threats after her performance in Sonic 06. She apparently stated that the threats were based around the poor story and how Tails plays a crap role to which she stated she had no part in. Seriously, if your gonna threaten someone then at least know who to threaten.
  • A non-dialogue related example is the creation of "Mobius". Many blame Sega of America for making such a place instead of staying true to the Japanese continuation, but the Sonic games were written with the intent of having a loose storyline; so that different regions can make their own versions of the story.
• Super Smash Bros.: No, Lucario was NOT intended as a Replacement Scrappy for Mewtwo. The two play nothing alike.
• Contrary to popular belief, League of Legends actually does have different people working on different aspects of the game - most notably the champion designers, maintenance people, and the map designers. Whenever Riot announces a new champion, the cries are often "Why can't you fix the lag/servers?" or "Where's the Magma Chamber?".
• Ted Woolsey got a lot of crap for his ridiculous translations, but most people don't realize that he did the best he could with Nintendo's censorship policies, and he didn't have the horrible grammar problems that later translations did. Thankfully, he's starting to get some credit.
• In a spectacularly brutal inversion of this, Capcom's European branch has blamed Mega Man Legends 3's cancellation on the fans, for not giving enough support on the devroom. Despite the fact that Capcom didn't even release the prototype (which was supposed to get made for obtaining fan response) in the first place. Needless to say, no one in the fanbase was fooled. Things only got worse, when they tried to clear confusion over the actual statement...
• Harvest Moon fans often blame Natsume, who are simply the localizers and translators in the Americans, for certain problems that were present in the Japanese versions. However Natsume has such a bad rep because they've caused so many glitches with the games, they change parts of the games, and their translations are often butchered.
• Many of the "new" script for Final Fantasy IV actually is Older Than They Think - the game was released with 75% of the intended script cut. Subsequent remakes have decided to restore some of the cuts.
• The Sims fans generally try to avert this by refering to "EAxis", when it's not known if a problem is EA's fault or Maxis'.
  • This trope was, however, fully in force with the latest SimCity game... EA received all the blame on that one, while Maxis actually seemed to receive sympathy for apparently being forced into making such a blight on the history of gaming.
• Oblivion is sometimes blamed for changing a bizarre Tamriel into a Medieval European Fantasy. Much of these complaints stem from the fact that the elven provinces, as well as Cyrodiil, had quite a few un-European traits that originated in older games like Redguard or Morrowind. For example, Cyrodiil was a jungle, had large rice fields, had a vaguely Tenochtitlan like capital, and had a strong tattoo culture. While those complaints may be justified, some seem to think that all of Tamriel lacked traits from Medieval European Fantasy.
• Morrowind fans often call out Oblivion and Skyrim for being "dumbed down for casual gamers" because they don't have as many features as Morrowind (never mind that those removed features tended to be Game Breakers, awkward to use, or both)...when, in actuality, Morrowind was a vastly less complex game than Daggerfall. Chalk it up to Nostalgia Filter.
• Castle Shikigami 2 was released in the US with notoriously bad translation. Turns out that although the translation wasn't great, the original was incomprehensible as well.

Web Original

• Lampshaded in this cartoon.

"Steven Spielberg is the executive producer for Jurassic Park 3, but we still blame him anyways."

• Would you actually believe this page had credited Hitoshi Sakimoto for the wrong game for quite awhile, actually?
• In his commentary for the TGWTG Brawl, Doug Walker wasn't exactly happy with Fan Dumb calling him a misogynist for showing a pillow fight between The Nostalgia Chick and Little Miss Gamer, explaining that Lindsay had been the one to come up with it, not him.^[7] Same went for Noah Antwiler and his commentary for the first "Spooning With Spoony".
• YouTube comments are a factory of this; and frankly shows how so little people actually do the freaking research about stuff. Humorous examples include:
  • Saying the Japanese ruined Pokémon...when the Pokémon franchise was created by a Japanese company!
    • Blaming and crediting Nintendo for Pokémon games; when Nintendo is only the PUBLISHER.
    • Saying Ken Sugimori is running out of ideas and pointing towards Vanilluxe - Vanilluxe was designed by James Turner.
  • Saying Nintendo ran out of ideas and re-used music for KingdomHeartsReCoded - In no way is Nintendo involved in the Kingdom Hearts franchise outside of advertising it in Nintendo Power. Nintendo is not even the publisher.
  • Saying Disney should have finished The Thief and the Cobbler. Disney had nothing to do with that movie, it was made to be an anti-Disney, and the artstyle looks nothing like the artstyle of Disney movies.
  • Pointing fingers at Nickelodeon for stuff done in the Doug series after it was bought out by Disney.
    • Blaming Disney for changes to Doug, when most of the original crew was still retained.
  • Bashing Warner Bros (or Time Warner) for removing music on YouTube; when it was actually Warner Music Group, a completely separate record company. And neither Warner Bros. nor Time Warner owns WMG anymore. WMG spun off from Time Warner in 2004, and since then, they are owned by private investors, not Time Warner. At least the record company still keeps "Warner" in their name.
• For Little Kuriboh's Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series, despite the fact 4Kids are the main villains of the 3rd season, fans keep on saying that 4Kids are responsible for banning Little Kuriboh / Card Games FTW. However, they were recently suspended by a Japanese company named Nippon Ad Systems - Little Kuriboh even stated himself that people should stop blaming 4Kids, and 4Kids are still blamed to this day.
  • Granted it wasn't even the company that banned him, but one of the faulty copyright bots Youtube uses to enforce copyright.
• The Nostalgia Critic often ends up blaming movies for elements that originated from the works they were based on. Case in point, the purple suit worn by The Phantom, as well as his nickname "The Ghost Who Walks".
  • His fans will usually attempt to justify this with "That's just his persona!" or "That's part of the joke!" The problem with this is, when there's no apparent difference between person and persona, and when the joke is just being wrong about things, you can't reasonably expect people to either get it or find it funny.

Western Animation

• Many people blame Scrappy Doo for "ruining" Scooby Doo (specifically, dumping half the original cast, switching to a Two Shorts format, and the franchise's first clumsy attempts to lose the Scooby-Doo Hoax) due to the timing of his introduction. Ironically, Scrappy is what probably saved the show from cancellation way back in 1979. And the success of that new incarnation of Scooby Doo is likely what has kept the franchise going on for some 40 years.
• In Futurama, the episode introducing Dwight Conrad was originally scheduled for season 3, but was held back to season 5, despite the fact that the character appears in a number of episodes in between this. Many fans assumed that this was due to the Fox Network's seemingly random scheduling (which resulted in similar continuity errors regarding a few minor characters) but in fact some dialogue needed to be re-recorded and the actor playing Dwight wasn't available at the time. The decision to delay airing was made by the show's producers.
• Nickelodeon took a lot of heat for the second half of the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender taking so long to air that two episode premiered in Canada and another two on DVD. However, this was because production on the finale had been delayed, and Nickelodeon didn't want to air less than half of a season only to have another hiatus right before the end of the series.
• There's lots of poorly spelled rage on the interwubs surrounding the new film spinoff of the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, mostly about how it's George Lucas's "worst movie yet!" In fact, Lucas's input was more or less limited to suggesting the essentially already-made feature-length pilot be distributed theatrically instead of going straight to Cartoon Network.
  • Well, he did also suggest making a Camp Gay Hutt, so we can blame him for that.
• Warner Bros.' Histeria! has received some undeserved bashing because the people in question think it got Animaniacs and Freakazoid! cancelled. Animaniacs and Freakazoid! (which was canned BEFORE Histeria! even began production) were actually cancelled because the network was upset that they were more popular among people older than Kids' WB!'s target demographic.
  • Freakazoid's cancellation is also sometimes blamed on Madman creator Mike Allred, on the grounds that he sued over Freakazoid's similarity to his creation. This is not true. Mike has openly stated that he was unhappy that he didn't receive a credit for his influence, but he never sued—he didn't feel it was worth it.
• Sites like Youtube have shown the unaired Pilot Episode of As Told by Ginger, made in 1999 (before the show went live). Apparently people thought this was an attempt to restart the series despite the fact that the animation and designs were still being worked out. (Ginger's Perm agrees!) Apparently, that wasn't enough of a hint as people said the writers were racist because Miranda was shown as being a brown-haired Caucasian (As opposed to being black in the series). In truth, Miranda was actually animated as white for the pilot...but she was rectonned to be black because of her voice actress, Cree Summers. Also, Blake was made much more sophisticated...he's shown in the pilot as crashing a teenage party in his underwear for kicks.
• A very strong example of Misblamed ignorance plus the Nostalgia Filter is the 2003 series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was complained at by fans of the 80s version for being an "In Name Only remake of the 80s version", with no Bebop, Rocksteady, Krang, or ultra-silly themes, as well as how it was less faithful to the comics. Lies - The 2003 series is actually more faithful to the comics and the 80s version was the In Name Only adaptation.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic book series doesn't help matters, since it was based off of the animated series and was probably read more by said complainers. Of course, Eastman and Laird's Mirage Studios didn't produce that book series - it was licensed out to Archie Comics.
• People who don't realize there are two English dubs of at least the first three seasons of Winx Club like to slam 4Kids for their horrible "re-dub" of the series. The "re-dub" in question was done by a Canadian company and is actually more faithful to the original version than the 4Kids dub is.
  • On a latter note, 4kids is sometimes blamed for plot holes they did not create. For example, Beta Academy is mentioned in the original Italian dub.
  • Now that Nickelodeon owns the show, they're getting lots of criticism for their "changes" (new music, Layla's name to Aisha, etc.). Some of these people thought 4Kids created Winx Club. The truth: Nickelodeon's undoing many of 4Kids's changes to make a more faithful English dub.
• Warner Bros. has taken some criticism for making the Tom and Jerry movie when they actually didn't because they didn't own the characters until three years after the movie's release. It was actually made by Film Roman and distributed by Miramax Films. The only thing Warner Bros. has to do with it is distributing the DVD release.
• Most of the hate for Cartoon Network's The Problem Solverz stems from the disproven idea that it was the show that replaced Sym-Bionic Titan. SBT was cancelled because it couldn't secure any merchandising deals, while Problem Solverz had already been in the works for years before said decision was made. For being the most hated cartoon on the Internet, it seems quite a significant portion of people are misinformed and Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch.
• Many people believe that the mature content in Ren and Stimpy: Adult Party Cartoon was the result of John Kricfalusi's Protection From Editors when it was actually forced on him by higher-ups at Spike TV.
• Tim Burton gets blamed for upstaging credit on Henry Selick for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Debates rage over who did the most work and will go as far as to insult one or the other. In actuality Burton chose Selick to direct so he could direct Batman Returns. Another fact is, directors, actors and even producers, rarely control the billing of a film. Such things are done by the studio marketing department and the executives. The lines get even more blurred when it came to Coraline which advertized as being From the Director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is factual as Selick did direct both Nightmare and Coraline. Still Burton gets blamed for upstaging credit for Coraline despite the fact Burton didn't have anything to do with Coraline.
• The Superhero Squad Show is sometimes used as an example of the Disney/Marvel merger ruining Marvel forever, but it began production before Disney bought them.
• Seth MacFarlane tends to get misblamed on a lot of things (possibly due to his Hatedom claiming that he is everything that's wrong with animation). One notable one is the animation of Butch Hartman. He is automatically blamed for those just because he's friends with the guy despite the fact that he has nothing to do with those projects. Instead, it's Hartman and Fred Seibert (the latter which never seems to get any sort of hate despite being the producer of those shows). And of course, there's the cash grabs and merchandising that the studio does and not him.
  • Another notable misblaming is MacFarlane being somehow blamed for Futurama being canceled due to an obsessive Fan Dumb for that show. The truth is that Family Guy was canceled one full year before Futurama was and MacFarlane wasn't even doing anything with Fox at the time. Also, MacFarlane and Matt Groening happen to be friends in Real Life so MacFarlane probably would have wanted Futurama to continue. He also had a voice role in the fourth direct-to-DVD Futurama movie.
• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. No, Lauren Faust is not responsible for everything, good or bad, that has ever happened on the show. She merely came up with the idea and wrote a handful of episodes, and in fact will not be involved with the third season at all.
• Due to Disney's history with Greg Weisman related shows (Gargoyles and WITCH), many fans blame Disney for cancelling The Spectacular Spider-Man. However, it was more a case of Screwed by the Lawyers. Due to Disney's acquisition of Marvel, Sony gave away their TV rights in order to keep making Spider-Man movies. Since Sony still owned The Spectacular Spider-Man, it would've forced Marvel to pay to continue the series.

Real Life

• To avoid any Flame Bait, a lot of decisions made or proposed for a lot of countries out there are misblamed as being thought up solely by whoever is considered the head of the government (Prime Minister, President, etc.). Nope...that may have been the case sometimes, but not every time. Granted, this is a very easy thing to happen though, what with how most people won't know everything that happens in their government without actually being there, so most people know of it through the media. But the Media has often misblamed things as being "All the head-guy's fault". The media will have you believe that the prime minister or president does everything by themselves - no mention of senators, governors, legislatures, etc unless they are caught in some scandal.
  • This also extends with business decisions made by large companies. Once more...how would an average joe customer know what goes on in the secret meetings? For all we know, a decision that customers may not be fond of wasn't the CEO's idea, but a department head's.
    • An example of this would be say, your favourite Fast Food Restaurant doesn't carry the item you like anymore, and the customer hay have misblamed the manager as choosing not to carry it, but it's actually the store owner who chose not to carry it. It's not inherently obvious, but it doesn't stop this trope from occurring in the darndest locations.
  • A specific example is the American Presidency. The way most people blame the president, you'd assume that the president is some kind of Single-person Dictator or Monarch who gets whatever s/he wants when they're in office. Mention the people who actually come up with acts and, unless they're in the news for something scandalous or are in a major position (Minority party leader, speaker of the house, etc), you'll probably get blank stares.
    • The Supreme Court outside the state level is also rarely mentioned outside of a few major decisions. Most people often act shocked in the media when nobody can recognize the face of a federal judge, but given how many coverage they get, can you really blame them?
• When a Vocal Minority of a group, race, gender, etc. does something outrageous, in a lot of occasions the entire group gets demonized for it, including those that have nothing to do with it or even oppose it. Americans for example: Most of them are not loud, boorish, fat, lazy, uncultured, stupid, etc. While many, if not all countries also have a just as much of these "bad apples" as well, due to the amount of Americans in the media compared to many others, Americans are often painted as the problem child. (It helps when you have Manipulative Editing on your side, too - check the article to see how easy it is)
  • For that matter, add just about any Vocal Minority into this. The Furry Fandom, Anime&Manga fans, Macintosh/PC/Linux users, most comic book fans, the Fandom of video games (Final Fantasy VII and Halo come to mind), the playerbase of any MMOG, fans of any sports, most religous people....One could go on forever, but it's best to just check the article for examples and explanations.
• Certain feminist groups have declared the bra or brassiere a "man's invention" or some expectation a man places on them, with some extremists declaring it a man-made torture device. In reality, the brassiere was invented by Mary Phelps (also known as "Caresse Crosby") who isn't a man, and invented it to be an alternative to the much more uncomfortable corset, which is often attributed to...another woman. Catherine de' Medici of France is often attributed to introducing the corset, and making it a symbol of beauty.
  • A double example, since feminists get blamed for the whole idea of burning bras, when in fact the notion was created by anti-feminists and the practice has never been adopted by feminists. And now there are groups of feminists who have started burning bras as a result of the notion that feminists followed that practice, making the conception true and turning it into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
• When a 14-year-old girl was interviewed on a lie-detector on the Kyle and Jackie O Radio Show and confessed than she'd been raped two years earlier, Kyle Sandilands received most of the vitriol, even though the girl's mother had known about the rape, yet brought her on the show to win concert tickets, had been asking the questions, and didn't tell anyone in the studio until later. While some blame for the girl's humiliation should go to the producers, Kyle's already poor image as a shock jock and Australian Idol's "mean judge" seems to have made him the main target, and distracted attention from the highly disturbing behaviour of the girl's mother.
  • Though it didn't help that Kyle's immediate response to the girl's rape comment was: "And is that the only experience you've had?"
• In pretty much anything that's created by a multitude of people, the credits may not correctly identify someone as having any role, and even then, they may not spell out whose idea it was for something that people don't like. This happens in anything, Movies, Games, Software, you name it. Most people don't also know exactly what it's like to create something or how much effort goes into it, but some people subvert this by studying what kinds of technology is used to create their favourite game or the scene in their favourite movie.
  • Metacritic announced in Spring 2011 that they would be giving scores to game developers, based on an average of the games they worked on. Kotaku's commenters promptly pointed out that it's usually not Model Rigger #263's fault if they end up working on a poor game.
• Some history books portray Hernando Cortes and his Spaniard conquistadors as being the sole destroyers of the Aztecs beyond Smallpox. Lies - They had massive help from the Tlaxcalans and other Native American tribes who hated the Aztecs and saw the Spaniards as the perfect opportunity to get rid of them. (Somewhere around 60,000 Natives joined the Spaniards - there probably were half that amount of Spaniards fighting at most) The Tlaxcalans were also treated much better, often being being taken on future Spaniard conquests. (Despite Aztec Upper classmen being treated virtually the same for awhile after they were conquered, since Cortes actually wanted to maintain the structure of the empire, and it was illegal to enslave Indians, just not very well enforced, a lot of the Slave owners in latin america went there to bypass the laws)
• FOX affiliate stations (unlike many others) are all branded prominently as "FOX [channel number]". Because this logo appears in their local News Broadcasts, it is often assumed that the Fox News Channel is responsible for their content, or even that the story aired on Fox News itself (by people who apparently don't even know that FOX and the Fox News Channel are two separate networks).
  • Two separate networks owned by the same conglomerate, though. It does make sense that Fox News would be the number one source for national stories for localized affiliate stations, especially if those stations have reduced how often they use their own reporters due to budget issues. But it's still unfair to assume ALL their information comes from Fox News, especially since Fox usually doesn't directly own the local station..
• Apple, Inc. supposedly has only one employee. His name is Steve Jobs. He is the one who does all of the research and development, makes all of the decisions, builds all of the products himself, and receives all of the criticism.
  • And similar to the above, Microsoft supposedly has only one Employee: Bill Gates. Similar to how people yell at Steve Jobs for glitches/shortcomings with Apple products, any shortcomings/glitches/what have you with a Microsoft product are treated like it is 100% Bill's doing. Xbox 360 red ringed? Bill Gates did it. Zune broke? Bill Gates's fault. Didn't like Halo? Again, Bill Gates. Note that Bill's retirement as CEO has merely slowed the complaints, not stopped them.
    • Since Bill's retirement, a lot of people just replace his name in complaints with Steve Ballmer's.
  • Also concerning Apple, in recent years people have been accusing them of mistreating "their" manufacturing workers in China. However, the workers in question are actually employed by Foxconn, a huge electronics company with the likes of Intel, Sony, Microsoft and many others among their clients. Apple are big enough clients that you could hold them responsible to some degree, but they could cease all orders from Foxconn tomorrow and it, sadly, would not change a thing about how their workers are treated.
    • Though of note is that it's not so much that people are singling out Apple for using sweatshop made labor for their electronics and not knowing/caring that other companies do the same, but rather that Apple seems content to use sweatshop labor despite its attempts to brand itself as the caring, "different" electronics/computer company, darling of the sort of people who don't eat cheese because milking cows is "cruel".
• Windows is often blamed as the problem child if any glitches or viruses occur to the computer. While true in some occasions, most of the time the problem is usually from user error, hardware error, a bug on an installed program (often doing something that the documentation tells not to do), or an infected file downloaded from the internet. And as for viruses, let's just say that the internet is not always a nice place. Most viruses these days are specifically made for Windows environment for the simple reason that it is the most common system right now, and thus a virus is most likely to infect computers and spread if it is programmed with Windows in mind. This naturally has led to Apple computers getting mis credited as being virus-safe when this is only because no one's creating viruses for Mac OS. This situation is now begining to change as malware writers are turning their attention to macs as well, which often lack the security awareness Windows users have normally built up as a result of this.
  • Not to mention, some of the problems with Windows Vista at first was actually with the drivers.
• In France, most people who have heard of Edouard Pailleron believe that he was a really bad architect who built high schools that were very vulnerable to fire. He was actually a writer, his name was associated with it because the first such high school to burn was named after him.
• Some internet websites such as Hulu are often chastised that some or all of their content cannot be viewed outside of the US. Some accuse these sites of only "catering" to "Eaglelanders" (and with Anti-Americanism at its high, you can bet that racist remarks will often pop up from this). However, this is because of copyright and legal issues between nations and companies preventing the content to be seen legally in other nations. This is also true for companies from other nations as well; just try and use BBC's iPlayer service from anywhere outside the UK.
• In the latter years of the 20th century, Intel was blamed a number of prominent failures in their processor and motherboard lines due to errors in the circuitry. What was less well known was that the majority of the errors were introduced by 3rd party manufacturers who incorrectly implemented the specs.
• Honda's "Hoodie Ninja" ad drew some flack for portraying a Japanese-American character as a ninja, because it was a stereotype. While the actress portrayed is Asian-American, Tania Gunadi has Indonesian ancestry, not Japanese. In other words, the people complaining about stereotypes couldn't tell one Asian-American from another.
• Many web server programs (such as Apache) include a default page in the document root directory. This default page is supposed to be seen by an administrator who is testing a newly-installed server, to verify that it's up and running. Sometimes the default page just says something like "It works!" and nothing else, but in other cases it gives the name of the server program (and in the case the program is from an OS distributor rather than the upstream developer, the name of that operating system) and a URL and/or email address for its developers. This has led to the following recurring situation:
  • A web server machine has a problem of some kind, so its administrator begins reinstalling the server software from scratch; or alternately, the server hostname's DNS record changes to point to a different server machine, one that currently has only an unmodified new web server installation (with no web content).
  • Because of the above condition, the "default page" is served to web browsers in place of the content that would normally be on the server machine.
  • Users try to use the server like they normally do, and unexpectedly see the "default page".
  • The users, frustrated that the server isn't working, complain to whoever's contact information is on the "default page" (that being the developers of the web server software and/or the developers of the operating system it's running on), demanding that they fix the server installation (which they can't do, because the server machine doesn't belong to them), and sometimes even accusing them of hacking into the server.
• Contrary to what adults between 35-64 may believe, 16 and Pregnant (and its spin-off series Teen Mom) did not make the teen pregnancy problem in America worse than ever. If anything, MTV launched the series to help combat the issue after the infamous nineteen girl pregnancy pact in Nebraska. Another variant of the blame are from mothers who got pregnant young as well, with most of them claiming the show does not reflect their personal experience. The irony of those complaints is that many mothers prove that their experiences are vastly different from the show's pregnant girls, along with other teen mothers. This also makes the case that the show can't truly capture the average American's teen pregnancy situation, since there's no ideal way to show it (many Muslim Americans made similar complaints toward the producers of All American Muslim). 16 and Pregnant certainly has its share of problems - unintentional glorification is a commonly cited one - but from the sound of detractors, you think that 16 and Pregnant invented teen pregnancy.
• Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring at a time when DDT was being ridiculously overused and the U.S. government was forcibly spraying it on private property. She made it clear that she did not advocate banning the chemical completely, but using it responsibly. If she lived today, she would almost certainly support using DDT to battle malaria in Africa.

1. ↑ published by Viz Media, who also gets a share of the blame
2. ↑ Believe it or not, the queen is Keira Knightley.
3. ↑ who never even owned rights to the franchise except for co-production rights with MGM
4. ↑ even though MGM owned the original film rights to Tolkien's works since the early 1970s
5. ↑ It was a Deadpan Snarker quip from Banks that Hackett himself has denied ever actually happened
6. ↑ around the time of the release of WC2: Secret Operations 1; EA involvement with Origin is, in other words, older than the fandom thinks
7. ↑ He wasn't angry at Lindsay, just the concern trolls.