Start My Own

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    "Yeah, well, I'm gonna go build my own theme park! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the park!"
    —Bender, Futurama

    A character or characters are disgruntled with the way a certain organization or group is run, and (usually after getting kicked out) decide that they will not just start their own, but it'll be better than the original. Generally either ends with the new organization actually being better or, alternately, failing miserably as An Aesop about how some things are harder than they look. Sucessful attempts should take care don't fall into the same problems they left the original over.

    Starting your own will often result in an example of We ARE Struggling Together!.

    Whoever wrote this page was an idiot. Geez. Who thought of that crap? In fact, I'm going to make my own page, one that's a billion times better what we had before!

    I'll add my own examples! With blackjack! And hookers!

    Anime and Manga

    • This is Haruhi's motivation for starting the SOS Brigade in Suzumiya Haruhi after she joins every single club at the school and quits after she gets bored.
      • Played very straight by being the direct cause of the plot in Boredom.
    • Lelouch, the Magnificent Bastard main character of Code Geass, starts the Order of the Black Knights after the existing La Résistance proves its incompetence by getting decimated in a single episode. He later upgrades that into declaring his intent to start a new country. Though in the end he gives up on the idea and switches to taking over the existing one.
    • After having helped save the world at the end of the second Pokémon movie, the Team Rocket trio have this discussion amongst themselves:

    Jessie: So then we're not bad!
    James: That's good!
    Meowth: But what if the boss finds out?
    James: That's bad.
    Jessie: We'll start our own team!
    James: That's good!
    Meowth: But we got no money!
    James: That's bad.
    Jessie: Then we'll just steal some!
    James: That's good! Or is that bad?

    • This is the premise of the manga Gothic Sports, where, motivated by the fact that they simply would never see any play in their school's normal soccer team, a few girls (with two guys...) get together and start their own team for the school.
    • Ryuusuke and Eiji of Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad initially play in the same band, Serial Mama, until personal differences and a missed opportunity with a record producer drive them apart. Both find success with their respective bands: Eiji's Belle Ame is commercially-successful, backed by influential producer Ran; while Ryuusuke with Beck have a much longer arc of struggles before gaining world-wide recognition.

    Comic Books

    • In Ann Nocenti's final issue of her Daredevil run, the Kingpin decides that if he can't force newspapers to run or not run the stories he wants, he will start his own media empire.

    Kingpin: What sells newspapers?
    Underling: Crime... Tragedy... Violence...
    Kingpin: Well then, we'll just have to start a war.

    • Presumably, this is the reason why Image Comics exists. Others have claimed that Image was founded not for creative freedoms, but for bigger paychecks.
    • In Rucka's 2011 run, The Punisher takes on The Exchange, a bunch of former members of other various criminal organizations in the Marvel universe who decided to start their own organization.

    Film

    • Revenge of the Nerds centers around the titular nerds creating their own fraternity chapter after being rejected by all the existing ones. Of course, being Hollywood Nerds, the only one that will even give them a chance is the historically-black Lambda Lambda Lambda. This does come in handy later on in the movie.
    • In the movie Bring It On Again the main character starts her own cheer squad to spite the snobby head cheerleader.
    • In the movie Little Giants, the kids not chosen to join Coach Kevin O'Shea's pee wee football team started their own team.
    • Jerry Maguire starts off with Jerry becoming disillusioned with the way the sports agency operates and he is subsequently fired. He decides to start his own agency and the rest of the movie follows his struggle to keep the business afloat while still maintaining his new principles.
    • One of the jokes in Eurotrip about the Bratislavan exchange rate involves Scott tossing a small coin to a hotel employee, who then quits and announces that he intends to buy his own fancy hotel with the coin.

    Literature

    "if I can trust my hunches, if I truly understand the captain's way of life, his Nautilus isn't simply a ship. It's meant to be a refuge for people like its commander, people who have severed all ties with the shore."

    • Happens a couple times in Warrior Cats:
      • Some remnants of BloodClan decide to make their own Clan... in Ravenpaw and Barley's barn.
      • Sol, some time after parting ways with SkyClan, attempts to form his own group in an abandoned Twoleg nest.

    Live Action TV

    • An episode of Are You Being Served had the regular staff getting into a disagreement with the cafeteria staff. The cafeteria staff walks out and the regular staff are determined to do a better job than the cafeteria staff. They do - but only by sneaking out and getting expensive take-out food. Realizing that they were working extra-hard and spending themselves into a hole, they gave in and apologized.
      • They weren't determined to do a better job, they had claimed that they could and the owner of the department store told them that they had to since the cafeteria staff all resigned and it was their fault.
    • A Story Arc of The Office focused on Michael Scott quitting Dunder-Mifflin to start the Michael Scott Paper Company. By the second episode of the arc he was at it again: "I should leave them and start my own paper company. That'll show them." Either he's in some sort of feedback loop or it's a writer's lampshade.
    • Pretty much the overarching plot of the short-lived Wall Street drama Bull: A group of young turks break away from the stockbroking firm they work for and make their own. It's not always smooth sailing, of course, which provides the drama of the series.
    • Smallville episode "Pandora" has Future Chloe take Lois to Watchtower. She responds with this line:

    Lois: Hey, Chloe? Remember when we were ten and I kicked you out of my clubhouse for spilling soda and you said you'd just build a cooler one? You win.

      • Also, at the end of Season 1, when Lionel Luthor decided to shut down Luthorcorp's fertilizer plant in Smallville, Lex started Lexcorp in retaliation. Then it was revealed Lionel had planned all along to give Lex a little taste of independence before taking everything from him.
    • This is what happens at the end of season three of Mad Men when Sterling Cooper becomes Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.. It starts in an extremely awesome fashion too.
    • An episode of Smart Guy had these sentiments. When the cost of a type of soda went up to over a dollar, T.J. began to create and sell his own soda for 30 cents.
    • The Practice: After Lindsay Dole's murder conviction had been overturned, she decided to start her own legal practice instead of resume her work at Donnell, Young, Dole and Frutt. Later on, Bobby Donnell left the firm to start another practice and the firm was renamed Young, Frutt and Berlutti. Later on, when Alan Shore and Sally Heep were fired from Young, Frutt and Berlutti, Sally suggested to Alan the idea of starting their own practice but he rejected the idea. After Alan's successful lawsuit for wrongful termination of employment, Jimmy left the firm to start a new practice.
    • Boston Legal: Jerry Espenson, a former associate of Crane, Poole and Schmidt, started his own practice after being fired for his reaction about not being named a partner. Despite having a good success, he decided to return to his former employers and was eventually named a partner.
    • Caça Talentos: This Brazilian show featured a talent agency named "Caça Talentos" (It can be translated to either "Talent Hunter" or "Talent Chaser") that was facing hard times. Silvana Carloff, who owned 30% percent of the agency, was pressuring the major shareholder into selling it. One of her efforts consisted of starting her own talent agency to compete against his.
    • Princess Princess D: This live-action version of the manga Princess Princess featured a group of boys that, not satisfied with their all-boys school's "Princesses", started their own group of "Princesses" known as "Dark princesses".
    • At the end of season 4 of Chuck Chuck gets fired from the CIA and decides to start his own spy agency.
    • At the beginning of Outsourced (TV series), Todd Dempsy considered starting his own novelties company rather than being transferred to India. All his boss did to make him accept going to India was remind him of a debt.
    • In one episode of Boy Meets World, Eric decides to start his own fraternity after getting fed up with the hazing of the official fraternities. Unfortunately for him, the dean catches on.
    • Nikos Karabastos, from Brazilian soap opera Uga-Uga, used to work at a toy factory until he decided to start his own and eventually became wealthier than his former employers.
    • In Glee, Sugar Motta has her rich father fund a second Glee Club within the same school after New Directions refuses to let her join. It doesn't change the fact that she can't sing to save her life.
    • A common trope for the gang in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Among many examples, they started their own band after seeing Dee's ambiguously retarded boyfriend being a hit rapper. They also wanted to launch their own gasoline preservation to make money for the bar. Charlie at some point, writes and directs his own musical. The list just goes on and on, including a desire to start their own police force, clothing line, Dennis running for comptroller, an all-age drinking bar, their own radio station, and so forth... it usually all descends into We ARE Struggling Together! category.
    • On How I Met Your Mother Barney and Ted always wanted to start their own bar called Puzzles. On New Year's Eve 2011 they are outraged by the high cover charge at their usual bar and jokingly suggest that they should just start their own bar in Ted's apartment. The idea takes off and news of the bar goes viral. However, as more and more people show up, the party turns rowdy. As their costs due to damages and other expenses rise, they have to keep raising their prices until they are almost the same as the real bar and everyone leaves. Also they don't actually have a liquor license.
    • The basis for several episodes of The Goodies, including "Radio Goodies" and "Hospital for Hire".
    • Bob Vila was originally host of This Old House on PBS, a home-improvement show. WGBH-TV underwriters Home Depot and Weyerhauser withdrew their support as Vila had appeared in an ad for a competing regional hardware chain in New Jersey (which is now defunct). Vila was sacked, and went on to appear in his own shows elsewhere.

    Music

    • After being fired from Metallica prior to the release of Kill 'Em All, Dave Mustaine formed Megadeth.
    • Ozzy Osbourne started his own band after Black Sabbath gave him the boot. His work there solidified him as a rock god. His replacement, Ronnie James Dio did the same thing.
    • Although Kim Deal formed The Breeders while she was still in The Pixies, a major reason the band was started was that she didn't get to sing and/or write enough songs in her main band.
    • Original Weezer bassist Matt Sharp started the Rentals out of a desire to do his own take on early New Wave rock, and made it his full time job after butting heads with Rivers Cuomo.

    Newspaper Comics

    Calvin: That's not a name for a club!

    Professional Wrestling

    • Behind the scenes (mostly) example: Jeff Jarrett and Vince McMahon came to foster a mutual loathing for each other during Jeff's last WWE run, to the point that, when WCW went under, neither Jeff nor Vince were at all interested in working with the other—Vince even announced, live and simulcast on WWF Monday Night Raw and WCW Monday Nitro, that Jeff was "G-double-O-double-N-double-E... GOONNEE!" So Jeff (with the help of his father, long-time promoter Jerry Jarrett) started his own Professional Wrestling promotion, TNA, which continues to thrive and grow to this day.
      • On a side note, it should be noted that Jerry Jarrett is a long-time friend of the McMahon family; he personally delivered the wrestler who would become Vladimir Kozlov to the WWE.
    • After David Otunga schemed to get Wade Barrett kicked out of The Nexus and CM Punk installed as leader in his place, Barrett went to Smack Down and formed The Corre instead. And two other founding members of The Corre, Justin Gabriel and Heath Slater, walked out of The Nexus shortly after Barrett was deposed, unhappy with the way Punk was running things. Barrett is quick to point out that, unlike with The Nexus, he is not the leader of The Corre, as it's a gathering of equals; then again, he said that about The Nexus at first too. It took a a few months, but Barrett's All About Me Attitude took over, and Gabriel and Slater promptly disbanded the group because of it.
    • Sometimes, this happens with title belts, most notably Ted DiBiase creating the Million Dollar Belt and Zack Ryder creating the Internet Championship.

    Sports

    • Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison, Jr. wanted to buy the then-flagging Washington Redskins in 1958, but he backed out of the deal after Redskins owner George Preston Marshall changed the terms that were unfavorable to him. As a result, Murchison formed the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, and the most-well known rivalry in NFL history was born.
    • This is the state of boxing with four "main" sanctioning bodies(five if you count the IBO) they are:the W.B.O, I.B.F, W.B.C, and the W.B.A. This means that at any time there are four champions in any given weight class at any time. Becoming "the" champ is damn near impossible because of a set of convoluted rules that pretty much disqualifies boxers from holding all the belts at the same time. This, compounded with all of them being notoriously corrupt and numerous other organizations springing up almost daily, effectively make belts worthless.
    • In March 1995, Tony George, head of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indy 500), announced the formation of the Indy Racing League (IRL), ostensibly to make open-wheel racing in America less Euro-centric and give more direct control of the sport to track owners. Oh, and the Indianapolis 500 would only be open to IRL drivers. The existing sanctioning body, C.A.R.T, responded with a blanked boycott of all IRL races and scheduling the new US 500 to run at the same time as Indy. The split remained for thirteen years before the sport was reunified under the IRL banner. Ironically, racing fans, confused and frustrated by the split, turned away in droves to stock car racing and NASCAR.
    • The American Basketball Association formed in 1967 to compete against the NBA, but was actually a long-term plan to merge its teams with the NBA, which happened (for some of them) in 1976.
    • The founder and first president of the ABA went on to form the World Hockey Association in 1972, and was the most successful challenge to the NHL's dominance in North American hockey and helped bring down the NHL's reserve clause. The WHA administration refused to incorporate the reserve clause (which allowed a club to extend a player's contract by a year when it expired and do so indefinitely, effectively binding a player to one club for his entire career) and set a then-landmark $2.7 million salary for Bobby Hull. Though the league didn't survive the Seventies, several teams merged with the NHL.

    Tabletop Games

    • The third party Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Sourcebook Untapped Potential was created by a group of Psionics fans in response to quality issues (Hint: It gets called "Complete Crud" for a reason) in the Complete Psionics first party sourcebook.
      • Pathfinder was created by D&D fans upset with the way that D&D's 4th edition turned out.

    Video Games

    • In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, an ex-member of the racing team Unlimited forms a spinoff called Neo Limited.
    • Laharl in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories: "I don't even wanna be a part of this stupid world. I wouldn't stay if you begged me! I’ll go find a better world, with heaps of food! And cookies!"
    • In Terranigma, Marily from Loire works at an expensive boutique at low wages, but after Loire expands, you can help her start her own business that sells affordable clothing to average consumers.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, one of the options for the White Glove Society sidequest is to expose Mortimer as a cannibal. When he realizes that he won't be able to turn the rest of the society (who are reformed cannibals) back to the old ways, he declares that he'll build an even better society before running off.

    Web Comics

    • Trawn from Electric Wonderland started her independent newspaper out of discontent with futuristic Cyberspace news outlets placing decreased emphasis on presenting harsh truths to citizens.
    • This Xkcd strip tells it like it is.

    Web Original

    Kaiba: C'mon, Mokuba. We're going to have our own tournament. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the tournament.
    ---
    Dartz: We'll have our own evil council, and ours will be much better. And we'll have pizza! Pizza is better than tacos.

    • In the Homestar Runner game "Strong Badia the Free", Strong Bad gets everybody to secede from the King of Town's domain. He thinks everybody is going to join the now-autonomous Strong Badia, but instead they all go off and create their own countries. The rest of the game is him trying to convince everyone to band together to overthrow the King.
    • Also, Wikis. Many are started because they have focused subject matter, but many others are founded because Wikipedia's standards of notability and citation somehow exclude them, or they think there's something biased about it. For instance, Conservapedia was created by a group who decried Wikipedia's "evidence" and "objectivity", and made their own online encyclopedia with their own bias. Another example specializes in covering the tropes of popular culture.
      • Since various wiki farms allow anyone to start a Wiki, this happens often with those who don't like the guidelines or procedures of an existing project. It often doesn't end well, since most of these people are neither suited to be admins nor have the ability to gather followers to their new wiki. Wikia (now FANDOM) is prone to host this sort of content fork; Wikia is in turn also prone to a long list of communities leaving or attempting to leave because of Executive Meddling by staff in the project's content, endless Ad Nauseam reskins to crowd out content with paid advertising and Think of the Advertisers! censorship as the author or reader isn't Wikia's client... the advertiser is. Once the disgruntled authors leave to Start My Own, the old wiki is left online as a direct competitor and is usually censored by staff to remove mention of the new project. This harms communities like Uncyclopedia, where the existence of multiple forks of the same project leads to a Broken Base.
      • Start My Own has also been necessary where an existing host has killed a project – for instance, the various incarnations of Encyclopedia Dramatica after its original host tried to close it and launch a new site (OhInternet!) in its place.
    • In some cases, Wikipedia will decide they don't want certain types of content (for instance, an entire encyclopaedia in the Klingon Language). Inevitably, as anyone can download the MediaWiki software for free and deploy it, a smaller and more specialised project will eventually be founded to serve that audience.
      • One of the most prominent examples (and far more successful than most) is the Star Wars fandom's Wookieepedia, which came about when Wikipedia purged a great many Star Wars articles as "non-notable". Copies of the purged articles were part of the core of Wookieepedia in its early days. Now Wookieepedia is the 5th-largest Wiki in existence.
    • Wikivoyage, a travel guide, was founded by disgruntled German and Italian travel authors after the founders of Wikitravel sold out to Internet Brands in a backroom deal for a then-undisclosed $1.7 million in 2006. IB then destroyed WT with intrusive advertising and a series of unresolved technical problems, causing more language communities to split and join Wikivoyage in 2012. IB even tried a strategic lawsuit against public participation against its own contributors, in a futile attempt to stop them from leaving. Wikivoyage is now part of Wikimedia, the not-for-profit behind Wikipedia, but it still took seven years for Wikivoyage's Alexa.com rank to surpass Wikitravel's due to duplicate content penalties imposed by search engines.
    • TV Tropes actually has some examples of its own of Start My Own:
      • Several users who were upset with the way that TV Tropes was run started their own version with more concentration on the actual elements of storytelling, analysis of how they are used in works, and less concentration on Japanese media. According to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, however, this site seems to have shut down some time in 2013.
        • And now The Tropes Wiki has its own example of Start My Own. A user, disgruntled that the Admins at the Tropes Mirror wouldn't let him import pages upon pages of S&M porn to the wiki went and started his own... but unlike the Tropes Wiki, this one (which appears to be a one-man operation) makes no pretense about being anything but a copy-paste of TV Tropes.
        • In addition to the first Start My Own Trope Mirror, there is now the Unofficial TV Tropes Mirror, which is being run by contributors to the original Tropes Wiki who are upset about the fact that the creators of the Tropes Wiki really meant it when they said that Anime would not be considered a Unique and Special Snowflake (the Unofficial Tropes Mirror Wiki, for example, renamed the "Band of Brothers trope page "Nakama", and doesn't bother with a "True Companions" page, for example.
      • This very wiki was also a Start My Own created by several veteran tropers (including one who'd been a member of the site since its early days) who disagreed with the major changes made to TV Tropes' policies in 2012.
        • And there has been at least one fork from ATT, as well.
      • Indeed, the whole point of Copyleft (for both open-source software and web content) is that the authors own the content and make it available under a free licence, so that they are free to take the work, fork off and go elsewhere with it.
    • Happens online all the time, due to the relative ease of creating a website. If we listed all the examples we'd be here all day. However, two famous victims are LiveJournal, which has a half-zillion clones at this point (all of them near-perfect clones in fact, due to the site's open-source codebase), and Deviant ART, whose restrictive policies led to the creation of SheezyArt and later FurAffinity. In most such cases, the result is similar to the comedic examples in fiction, with so many people starting their own site that none of them have many users.
    • At one point in its history, the Global Guardians PBEM Universe had a new referee who decided, without any consultation on the owners of the property, or with the other referees, that he was going to rewrite the history of the game world, and move the game to a new site out of the owner's control. When he was (justifiably) booted with extreme prejudice, he declared the old group lame and started up his own. It lasted about four months before folding.
    • Happened with Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Issa Rae, the creator, started the show because she was tired of the depiction of people like her as a Sassy Black Woman, a Magical Negro, or a sexy vixen.
    • Youtube clones, because some people don't want to upload to Youtube. Think Zippcast.

    Western Animation

    • The above quote is from the Futurama episode "The Series Has Landed" after Bender is kicked out of Lunar Park, and later when Fry and Leela keep Bender out of the Apollo 11 lunar lander. The line has gone on to become a popular meme.
    • In an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Bloo is not allowed into a rock band called Pizza Party. So to spite them, he invents his own band called Taco Feista (because, he reasons, tacos are more exotic than pizza). Bloo's own band leaves him and so he forms another band, which is just himself in various costumes.
      • In another episode, Bloo started his own foster home for imaginary friends, which was nothing more than a cardboard box.
    • In an episode of The Simpsons, the Stonecutters start the No Homers Society after they get disgruntled by Homer's attempts to do good in his position of power.
      • In another episode, Bart is kicked out of Mr. Burns' casino for being underage. The Squeaky-Voiced Teen taunts him, saying "What are you going to do? Start your own casino? In your tree house? And get all your little friends to come? I'd like to see that!" Cut to the next scene, where Bart is welcoming his friends into his tree house casino. "Well, he certainly showed me."
      • Yet again on The Simpsons, when Moe's Tavern gets a hip makeover and the old customers are no longer welcome, Homer starts a "hunting lodge" in his garage (he couldn't have a tavern there) where he and the old regulars hang out until Moe comes to his senses. They even went as far as taking part on regular hunting trips as all hunting lodges are required by law.
      • When Homer was banned from Moe's the first time, Marge suggested he pretend the house was a bar, so he could spend every night at home. He responded he wasn't even going to dignify it with an answer.
      • And yet again, when Homer is offended that Ned didn't invite him to his family reunion, Homer says he'll have his own barbecue and invite whomever he wants - "That'll show you!". However, Ned politely asks whether he can come and Homer says "Sure!" reflexively. D'oh!
      • The cause of Jebediah Springfield and Shelbyville Manhattan's split:

    Shelbyville: I will not live in a town that robs the man of the right to marry his cousin.
    Springfield: Then I will start my own town, based on abstinence, chastity and a flavorless mush I call root marm.

    • An episode of Arthur revolves around the kids creating their own "James Hound" movie, since they're not old enough to see the actual PG-13 movie themselves. They eventually discover that all the outtakes are actually better than what they planned.
      • An earlier one involved Muffy getting fed up with Arthur's shabby clubhouse and leaving to start her own club, and Buster and Francine deciding to join her. Gradually, everyone abandons not only Arthur's never-been-official-anyway club, but each other's as well, until everyone is a one-person "club" of their own. Eventually they all realize how stupid it all turned out, and get back together.
      • A later one involves Francine and a group of friends starting a band called U Stink only for Francine to quit and start her own band called We Stink with Arthur, Buster and George. Arthur and Buster end up getting mad at her and quitting and claiming they will form their own band and call it She Stinks. George doesn't mind staying but Francine gives up.
    • Similarly, in Rocket Power, the kids try to make their own movie and find it to be much harder than they were expecting.
    • In an early episode of Hanna-Barbera's The Little Rascals, when Alfalfa won't let Darla into the He-Man Woman-Haters' Club, Darla threatens to organize a She-Woman Man-Haters' Club: "And there will be no boys allowed!"
      • In a later episode, the Rascals put on their own circus after being denied admission to a real circus. Darla had told the circus owner that she and the boys were tending the animals because they had no money for tickets.
    • The male unicorn decides to build his own ark after missing Noah's on Robot Chicken.
    • In the Adventures in Care-a-Lot episode, "Whose Friend is Who?" a bit of a club war gets started because Cheer, Harmony, and Love-a-Lot reject Funshine and Oopsy's help in making a "project" with their human friend McKenna. So, with Grumpy, they make their own "project" and a subsequent club to go with it. The girls retaliate by forming their own club, and a montage of the two clubs one-upping each other in their projects ensues, with McKenna stuck in the middle, not wanting to pick a side. She eventually gets the two clubs to see how silly they're being by making a club with Wingnut, and calls them out when they band together to exclude her club.
    • Don Bluth was a Disney employee who was disgruntled with the lack of quality work that the studio was churning out at the time. He and some other animators left to form their own studio. It lead to some great stuff (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven) and later on, some much less great stuff (Rock-a-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, The Pebble and the Penguin). Seems it's time for one of his employees to do the same, so we can get some more good stuff.
    • In Family Guy, Peter is so jealous of Joe's home movie theater that he decides to build an addition onto his house to create an even bigger and better theater than Joe's. Of course, this plot is quickly forgotten once Peter digs up an Indian skull and the real plot of the episode starts.
    • A Looney Tunes cartoon started with Daffy Duck as a janitor of an inn that belonged to Porky Pig. Daffy was feeling unappreciated and, when Porky tried to show his appreciation by giving him a new broom, Daffy decided to start his own inn. Daffy's dishonest attempts to run his former employer out of business backfired. His last plan consisted of blowing up Porky's inn. Daffy DID blow up Porky's inn, but accidentally revealed the presence of oil under it, allowing Porky to build an even better inn. To show Daffy he doesn't keep hard feelings, Porky hired him to work at the new inn... as a janitor.
    • One episode of Dennis the Menace US portrayed Dennis and Margareth as business partners in a lemonade stand. Unsatisfied with her share of the profits, she started her own lemonade stand to compete against her now former business partner.
    • A mock episode of Bird Man retconned Murko the Marauder as a F.E.A.R. agent leaving to start his own criminal organization.
    • One episode of The Mask featured a character named Celia N. Airtight. She was a top researcher at Wrapmaster Corporation until being fired for knowing too much about food preserving and then she started her own company named Putterware to compete against Wrapmaster. Not satisfied with selling more than her rival, she plotted to turn leftover food into monsters to destroy Wrapmaster.
    • King of the Hill features Thatherton Fuels, a company founded by M. F. Thatherton, a former employee of Strickland Propane.
    • Taz-Mania episode "Francis Takes a Stand" featured Francis starting a lemonade stand. Taz opened another one across the street from Francis'. The only customer who ever appeared was a tax collector who, after buying a lemonade from Francis (and hating its taste), revealed himself a tax collector and took the money he gave Francis as payment for the lemonade.
    • In Camp Lazlo, Edward starts an "I Hate Lazlo" club, inviting everyone except, of course, Lazlo. He tells Lazlo to form his own club, the "Nothing Club", which Lazlo does. Soon everyone leaves Edward's club after finding it too boring (it's all about talking about how much they hate Lazlo, which only Edward does) and head over to Lazlo's.

    Real Life

    • This is how Cambridge University was formed. A bunch of students were kicked out of Oxford, made their way across the country, and started their own university.
      • The University of Bristol was genuinely founded by a man whose son failed to get into Oxford. The original 'college' is now the Physics Department
    • In an acrimonious divorce, the wife won ownership of the husband's family business, along with an order barring him from competing. So the husband got his son to open a new store across the street with the same name, and all the loyal customers flocked to the new store, bankrupting the old one.
    • A couple of the early 20th-century industrialists started their own golf clubs, university endowments, etc., because they kept getting shunned by old money families.
      • In the same way, New York City's grandest palazzo, the Metropolitan Club, was organized by J. P. Morgan in protest against not being admitted to some of the city's other exclusive private men's clubs. He showed them.
    • Quite a few religious sects got started because of this trope:
      • The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, who formed their own sect of Christianity because its founder, George Fox, objected to the Anglicans' emphasis on ceremony.
      • Martin Luther started the Lutherans after being excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
        • He started his own church! With beer! And wives for the clergy!
      • Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Only problem, the Catholic church considered divorce a sin, and so he had to ask the pope for an annulment. When the pope refused (Pope Clement VII was afraid of Catherine of Aragon's nephew, the Hapsburg king Charles V), Henry formed his own church, the Church of England, installed himself as it's head, and divorced her anyway.
        • Also note that Catherine had been his brother's widow, meaning by the convention of the time his father had needed a special papal ruling to allow him to marry her at all, making his annulment request a bit hypocritical.
      • The Baptist church in the United States in the 1800s favored abolition of slavery. The Southern Baptist church splits off in 1845 as an explicitly pro-slavery sect.
        • The Free Methodist Church's name comes from their abolitionist roots. That, and their refusal to charge for seats.
      • Christian humorist Adrian Plass, in one of his novels, mentions the concept of church groups splitting so often that some people are in danger of dissenting themselves right back to where they started...
      • Mormon Fundamentalists are what happens when, deciding mainstream Mormons were wrong to abandon polygamy, hardcore religious nuts start their own. This came about, mind you, after Joseph Smith did the same thing to Christianity.
        • Mormons would disagree with labeling their church as reformed.
      • The Episcopal Church in the US went through this following the election of a gay divorced man as bishop of New Hampshire. This caused many conservative Episcopal parishes to separate themselves into the Anglican Church in North America. For the time being the Episcopal Church retains membership in the international Anglican Communion (though relations are strained) and the ACNA has not been granted full communion.
      • The Metropolitan Community Church, as an international Protestant Christian denomination with a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, was founded by Rev. Troy Deroy Perry Jr. a few years after he was forced out of the Church of God of Prophecy for being gay.
    • As parodied in Monty Python's Life of Brian, political groups (especially radical fringe groups) are very splinter-prone. Just for fun, try to find a list of your local political parties and see how many different leftist groups there are. Also happens on the far right.
      • It's not just political parties. Any organisation which tries to bring together multiple disparate groups – each of which has its own strongly-held beliefs − is prone to this. It's a wonder that the average LGBT pride parade even manages to get off the ground, as one example, given the number of diverging viewpoints among most of the organisers.
      • It's not just third parties, either. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in the presidential election as one of four candidates running under the banner of the Democratic-Republican Party, but the Electoral College was split. The party elite in Congress ended up awarding the presidency to Jackson's rival, John Quincy Adams. In response, Jackson founded his own party, the modern Democratic party, and ran against Adams four years later, winning in a landslide.
    • This trope is credited as one of the reasons that Libertarianism (in the American sense) has so much trouble becoming a party with any real power. There are simply too many different groups that consider themselves Libertarian to ever organize.
    • In the art world of the 1860s, the Salon des Refuses was started in Paris by a group of artists, now referred to as the Impressionists, who were infuriated at being constantly rejected by the official Salon de Paris.
      • The Secession movement in Vienna, for much the same reasons.
    • Software, too, especially GNU and the Free Software Foundation. Half of the software listed on SourceForge would not exist without this trope, though it's usually spurred on by avoidance of restrictive licenses. Where religions have schisms, open software has "forks".
      • Granted, this trope is at the heart of FOSS software: Anyone who can do better, according to their philosophy, should be given the opportunity to prove it.
        • Sometimes some features of forked versions will be merged back into original versions. So, they can still help even in case of a large number of forks.
    • Has occurred in the Video Game industry as well. While working at Atari, Jay Miner (having previously developed the 2600 console and 800 computer) designed what would become the Amiga. Frustrated that Atari wouldn't produce it, he left, starting his own company, Hi-Toro, to build it. Hi-Toro went bankrupt, but Commodore bought them and the Amiga design, eventually manufacturing it themselves.
      • A handful of Atari programmers during the Ray Kassar era were disgruntled that not only were they not getting credit for the games they created, but such information was treated as top secret. So they formed Activision, the world's first third-party gaming company, which upon creation gave credit to the programmer who created the game right on the game box and in television commercials.
      • Electronic Arts was also founded for similar reasons not too long afterward. Now look at what they've become...
      • tri-Ace, developers of the Star Ocean series, was founded by the main programmer of Tales of Phantasia who was frustrated with the Executive Meddling that occurred with the games development.
      • A sad case is when most of the old-school developers of Blizzard Entertainment (the people responsible for Warcraft one and two, Diablo and StarCraft) left to form their own game studio, made the Diablo-clone Hellgate:London, and bankrupted.
      • In some cases, developers will leave a company and form their own due to Executive Meddling, as in the tri-Ace example... only to find the new executives they installed are worse. Ouch.
      • Telltale Games is another example, founded by ex-LucasArts employees after Lucasarts all but abandoned the Adventure Game genre.
      • Ditto for Petroglyph Studios, formed by former Westwood employees after EA shut down Westwood.
      • After expressing more than a little disappointment with the lackluster Nintendo Game Cube release WWE Wrestlemania X-8, Dave Wishnowski and a dedicated group began work on the PC-based wrestling title Pro Wrestling X. Despite getting off to a strong start with an article in Game Informer magazine, then lengthy delays in development that threatened to send it to the Duke Nukem Forever pile of Vaporware, his company Wish Bone X managed to start bearing tangible fruit with the concept in 2009, and the Prequel to the game, Pro Wrestling X: Uprising is finally slated for release between 4Q 2010 and 1Q 2011. Its success will apparently determine the viability of the original (expandable) concept game he'd originally intended back in 2001.
      • The Sony PlayStation began life as a CD add-on for Nintendo's Super NES console. However, when Nintendo backed out of their contract with Sony during development[1] and instead contracted with Philips for the add-on (which never materialized[2]), Sony turned the peripheral into a stand-alone console and entered the game market themselves, determined to teach Nintendo a lesson...which they did, displacing Nintendo's position at the top of the game industry with the PlayStation, and then retaining their stranglehold on the market with the PlayStation 2, forcing Nintendo to re-think gaming entirely in order to get back on top with the Wii.
        • Similar to the above, Atari passed up an opportunity to distribute the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US, leaving Nintendo to market and distribute the NES on its own. You know what happened next...
          • Many video game fans think that was for the best; while the NES would have come to North America a couple of years earlier, it's likely that Atari's mismanagement would've simply dragged Nintendo down with them, dooming the entire video game industry to a Japan-only niche.
        • Nintendo and Sony were so worried about large companies trying to co-opt their new consoles that they immediately rejected Microsoft's attempts to integrate online gaming into their console, so Microsoft started their own console.
      • Treasure Co., Ltd. is a developer founded by the former employees of Konami. They are known for their action games with innovative design. They partner with large game developers and working with licensed titles.
      • To say nothing of Valve Corporation, which was originally just some former Microsoft employees... until they released Half Life.
    • After Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler, he ran it with his brother for a while, until 1948, when a violent falling out between the two led Rudolf Dassler to move across the river and start his own sport shoe company, Puma. The city of Herzogenaurach is still fiercely split between the two brands to this day.
    • Lamborghini supposedly entered the luxury car business for this reason. In the mid-sixties, Ferruccio Lamborghini, president of what was then primarily a tractor manufacturer, came to Enzo Ferrari to complain that his recently purchased Ferrari had a faulty clutch. He also explained that he had tried the clutch from one of his own tractors in the car and it worked fine. A fierce argument followed, and Lamborghini looked through his car some more and decided that his company already had the ability to make most of the necessary components for a luxury automobile. The extent to which spite motivated Lamborghini's decision to enter this market has probably been exaggerated by people more interested in good stories than microeconomics.
    • Two examples come from the Power Metal band Helloween. The first being Kai Hansen's band Gamma Ray, formed after he got fed up with Michael Kiske and quit, the second being Masterplan, a band formed by Uli Kusch and Roland Grapow after being kicked out of Helloween for trying to take the band in a Darker and Edgier direction.
    • Garry Kasparov split from FIDE, the World Chess Federation, to form the PCA (Professional Chess Association) in 1993.
    • Sean Combs was fired from Uptown records during the early 90's. Afterward he formed his own label....Bad Boy Records. The latter is more or less still thriving while Uptown folded.
    • Dave Thomas (the restaurateur, not the actor) made a name for himself as assistant to Colonel Harland Sanders. Had he stayed in line, Thomas would probably end up inheriting the reins of KFC, but due to personal disagreements with the good Colonel, Thomas struck out on his own and founded his own restaurant chain, which he named after his daughter Wendy.
    • Theodore Roosevelt disliked William Howard Taft and the growing conservatism of the formerly moderate Republican party, so he started his own progressive liberal party, known informally as the Bull Moose Party. As with all United States third parties, it failed and instead split the vote so the Democrat won.
      • That was Roosevelt's intention. He hated Taft's policies and would have rather seen a Democrat win than Taft get re-elected. So he created the new party to sabotage Taft.
    • When Brazilian movie magazine SET was sold to a different publisher, one of the editors went to start its own publication, Preview. Both have a Fandom Rivalry now (it helps that said editor's boss at SET eventually returned to the magazine...).
    • The Founding Fathers of America hated living in the colonies under Great Britain. So they started their own country. With freedom, and representation. And then muddled everything by establishing protectorates of its own (Cuba, Guam, etc.)
      • Freedom? These folks owned slaves... and the long-running dispute over slavery would ultimately lead to the next Start My Own attempt, the American Civil War.
    • Boyd Coddington's hot rod shop, Hot Rods by Boyd, faced bankruptcy in 1998. So, president Chip Foose left to form his own company, Foose Design. The two companies endured a fierce rivalry right up until Boyd Coddington's death ten years later.
    • After leaving After Forever due to Creative Differences, Mark Jansen formed Epica.
    • Carpe Fulgur, the company responsible for the localization of Recettear, was founded by two guys trying to get into the localization business only to be constantly turned down due to lack of experience. So they decided to create their own company to earn that experience.
    • The United Services Automobile Association started as an insurance co-op formed by a group of American Army officers who couldn't get car insurance. Over the decades it has gradually expanded to become a rather successful financial institution offering insurance, banking, and various other services to American military personnel and their families.
    • When The WB and UPN decided to merge and become The CW, the new network did not include any of the UPN affiliates owned by Fox (including many of the big-market stations). In response, Fox created a new network for these stations, My Network TV.
    • Disney animator Don Bluth and Disney director Richard Rich both left the company and founded their own animation studios back in The Eighties.
    • After getting fired from Gamespot for undisclosed reasons (though the most popular is for giving a mediocre review to Kane and Lynch: Dead Men while the game was advertised on the site), Jeff Gerstmann went off to start the gaming news site Giant Bomb alongside other former Gamespot journalists.
    • After having some issues with Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg left and went on to help form Dreamworks Animation, which has been climbing on up since its founding.
    • After Freedom Group moved Bushmaster production to New York (with disastrous consequences for quality) they left behind the old facilities and skilled workers, who promptly founded Windham Weaponry.
    • World Outgames, an international athletic competition, was first held in Montréal in 2006 after that city's supposedly-successful bid to host the rival Gay Games broke down due to Executive Meddling by the parent organisation (Federation of Gay Games). The event was held in 2006 (Montréal), 2009 (Copenhagen) and 2013 (Antwerp) but went broke in 2017 (Miami).
    • Zilog, a chipmaker founded by former Intel workers. made the Z80 processors for a few early desktop computers (Sinclair ZX81, Radio Shack TRS80, most of the CP/M machines). IBM's 1981 introduction of the 5150 PC soon tilted the balance back to Intel as it used Intel's 8088 processor (and its successors used Intel 80x86-series chips).
      • Intel's own founders, chemist Gordon E. Moore (known for "Moore's law") and physicist Robert Noyce, left Fairchild Semiconductor to establish Intel in 1968.
      • Likewise, Intel's primary rival in desktop and laptop PC chips, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), was founded by eight disgruntled Fairchild Semiconductor workers - in 1969.

    Oh, so I'm not allowed with the other examples, am I? Fine, I'll start my own line! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the example! And the blackjack! Aww, screw the whole thing.

    1. ↑ because a buried clause would have given Sony perpetual rights to Nintendo's games
    2. ↑ but did spawn the infamous The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games
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