Straw Fan

Wait, no.

"Worst Cosmic Wars ever! I will only see it three more times... today."

— Comic Book Guy, The Simpsons, "Co-Dependent's Day"

A Straw Fan is a character or plot meant as a not-so-thinly veiled attack on the fans for their complaints about the work. It can be either perfectly justified or the sign of an ego run rampant. Take your pick. Or maybe the creator has trouble telling the difference between legitimate criticism and Fan Dumb or Hate Dumb (or is just too lazy to tell the difference).

See also Loony Fan and Occidental Otaku. Sometimes can cross into Affectionate Parody territory if the fans are good-humoured (and the Straw Fan similarly affectionate); likewise, an Affectionate Parody of one's fandom can drift here. Expect this person to say "I'm your biggest fan!" at least once. Also expect this person to embody at least one or more of the characteristics of Fan Dumb.

Subtrope of Write Who You Hate. Compare with Take That, Audience! and Straw Critic.

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Examples:

Advertising

• During Nintendo's E3 2014 Digital Direct, Nintendo had a scene done by the Robot Chicken crew. Someone sitting in the audience complains of Nintendo announcing another Super Mario Bros. game and that Nintendo should give them Mother 3. Instead, Reggie Fils-Aime eats a fire flower and shoots a fireball at the obnoxious fan. Later on, the fan shows up again complaining about a Star Fox game, and Reggie fries him with Eye Beams.

Anime and Manga

• Vivian Wong from Yu-Gi-Oh! is an exaggeration of many cliches in Original Character fanfiction and shows how the cast would really react to such a character. She's a skilled duelist renowned for her beauty and a fan of Yugi and Kaiba. While she wishes to form a Battle Couple with Yugi, she goes so far as to kidnap Yugi's grandpa to duel him, under the condition that if he loses, he'll become her boyfriend and slave. Yugi doesn't fall in love with Vivian like what one would expect in fanfiction, but is instead bothered by her behavior. As for the women, she's incredibly hostile towards Anzu and Rebecca just for being near Yugi, similar to how fangirls tend to apply Die for Our Ship to the female characters. The girls have no problem showing they don't really care for Vivian, and couldn't care less what happens to her.
• Ryosuke from Oshi no Ko is an example of an idol Otaku who becomes so obsessed with the notion of Contractual Purity that upon learning his favorite idol has gotten pregnant, he immediately goes to kill the doctor helping to bring her to term and then stalking her four years later to kill her. In contrast to the other fans of the idol who knew about it and accepted her secret to be happy, he considered it a betrayal to him.

Comic Books

• It seemed to be popular to Retcon big supervillains as having been fanboys of the hero before their Face–Heel Turn. William Burnside, Eobard Thawne (retconned from being a Straw Hater), and Lex Luthor all had this happen to them.
• Dark Crisis: In the tie-in miniseries Dark Crisis: Young Justice, the Big Bad is Mickey Mxyzptlk, the son of Mr. Mxyzptlk, who hates the fact that the sidekicks from his era, such as the Tim Drake Robin, the clone Superboy and Impulse, were all unceremoniously dumped by the wayside by their mentors and replaced by other people that he felt earned their spots unfairly due to retcons, deaths and other things. Tellingly, he states that he doesn't care about the newer characters and claims they shouldn't exist, when the characters shown in the relevant panel are all some kind of minority (with the characters shown including the lesbian Batwoman Katherine Kane, the non-binary Kid Quick and the African-American Batman Jace Fox). He portrays the fan who seemingly hates the rise of minority-based heroes in recent years shoving aside other tried-and-true heroes.
• The Flash: Eobard Thawne is the most Straw-y of them all, being simultaneously a takedown of the idea that anyone could replace Barry Allen as the Flash, as well as a takedown of fans who refuse to accept Wally West as the new Flash and wanted Barry to come back. This version of the character can be seen in The Return of Barry Allen.
• Green Lantern: In Green Lantern: Rebirth, Sinestro treats Kyle Rayner like a trashy Inadequate Inheritor whose mere existence cheapens the Corps. In an interview, Geoff Johns admitted that he intended for Sinestro to be a stand-in for Kyle-hating Hal Jordan fanboys, and that Hal's defense of Kyle modeled the attitude that he wanted Hal fans to have moving forward.
• The Outsiders: In Outsiders 2009, Dan DiDio created one named "Harold Winer" for a specific fan.^note link via archive.org. And set him up as a supervillain, so he could get beaten up. Oh, and made sure to make him Camp Gay.
• Runaways: In Runaways (Rainbow Rowell), Abby, with her obsession with keeping Molly young forever, is meant to be a stand-in for fans who supposedly refuse to let the Runaways grow up.
• Superman: Although there is more to the character, Superboy-Prime has attempted to destroy The DCU because it does not live up to his expectations. Certain fans tend to focus on nothing but this one aspect of his character, largely because it sometimes reaches a very mean-spirited pitch.
• Wonder Man: Wonder Man has turned into Marvel's most explicit version of Superboy Prime.
• X-Men: When Peter Milligan relaunched X-Force as X-Statix following the death of fan-favorite Edie Sawyer, the new book opened with an arc about a Reality Warper fanboy who couldn't get over the fact that they'd "gotten rid of" Edie and was holding his town hostage. However, not only does he ultimately become a sympathetic character, he joins the team and in their desire to not let him down the group actually gels somewhat for the first time. Although he's still an unstable, horribly dangerous psychotic who the team ends up murdering.
• Young Justice: Peter David created a Straw Fan in issue #13 to retaliate against a complaint he'd received about issue 7, only the fan was made into a cowardly bystander who made stupid speeches rather than a supervillain. Parts of the bystander's dialogue were taken from an online argument with the fan in question virtually word for word.
• Jhonen Vasquez wrote a comic where he is confronted by five stereotypes of his weirdest, creepiest, or most annoying kinds of fans and must fight them all to the death when they merge into a bloated abomination.

Films — Animation

• Hercules has a sequence after he becomes a famous hero where he's posing for a portrait, and the session is interrupted by a group of screaming fan girls who jump on top of him and try to rip his clothes off. This is based on incidents that actually happened to William Shatner and Harrison Ford with Star Trek and Star Wars fans respectively.
• In The Incredibles, the origin story of the villain Syndrome is that as a boy he was a big fan of Mr Incredible, however his over-enthusiasm got in the way of his hero's crime-fighting activities and was angrily told off. As an adult, he seeks revenge on Mr Incredible and by extension all the other supers as a tech genius supervillain.

Films — Live-Action

• The various series and movies starring and Not Quite Starring The Beatles also had mobs of screaming, insane fangirls - the thing is, none of them were established recurring characters. Most famously, A Hard Day's Night opens with the Beatles in full flight from a mob of their fans. The scene in A Hard Day's Night is actually a combination of Truth in Television and a subversion of this, as most of that scene was an actual stampede of fangirls which the quick-thinking Richard Lester told his crew to film.
• The entire plot of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back involves the title characters trying to sabotage a movie based on them to stop a flood of half-wit internet criticism. Once they receive a large cash payout for the film, they literally track down every last internet troll and beat them up. This was in part based on a Flame War between creator Kevin Smith and fans over the movie Magnolia (referenced when a particularly inarticulate fan has the screenname "MagnoliaFan").
• In Stardust Memories, Sandy, the Author Avatar for Woody Allen, is beset on all sides by fans who complain about how they prefer his "early funny films" to his more recent semi-dramatic work.
• Some viewers feel that the Documentary Special When Lit casts pinball collectors and fans in this light, particularly the less-than-flattering portrayals of Josh "Pingeek" Kaplan and Sam Harvey. Others, however, have argued that the movie is simply accurately reflecting their Real Life eccentricities.
• Clerks II has a The Lord of the Rings fan come into Mooby's and get into an argument with Randal as to its superiority over Star Wars. Randal ends up ripping into the Ho Yay between Frodo and Sam so much that the guy vomits.
• Scream (2022) showcases many of these fans in regards to the fictional Stab series, often reflecting how parts of the Star Wars fans reacted to The Last Jedi. The killers are even an Ax-Crazy cross of this and Loony Fan, given they're slicing up people in hopes their massacre can inspire a better Stab movie!
• Kamen Rider Zi-O: Over Quartzer: The Big Bad of the film wants to replace the Heisei Era of Kamen Rider with one that he feels is more canonically consistent by slamming the present day Earth into its past self; using his own Riders to control the "new" narrative. The Hero's movie-specific form has the distinct ability to summon a horde of side-characters and non-canon forms to retaliate.

Literature

• Misery, both the book and the film, took fan obsession to creepy scary heights in Annie Wilkes. Note, however, that King has referred to Annie as actually being a metaphor for his drug addiction. In the novel, Paul remembers a slightly more realistic fan of his work (who limited herself to re-furnishing her house to match the Chastain household from his novels, followed by a slightly disturbing barrage of fan mail), which helps him at least understand what kind of mindset he's dealing with.
• The Plague Dogs contains a scene where a minor character criticizes Watership Down, the author's previous work, which seems to exist for just this reason.
• In The Baby-Sitters Club Mallory Pike, #1 Fan, Mallory is this for her favorite YA author. First she sends her letter after letter after letter, growing angry when she doesn't respond to it personally, tracks her down to her home and makes herself the author's assistant...and then later gets angry at her because not all the events in her FICTION series actually happened to her in real life, and thought her a bad writer and a liar for it.

• Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun is set at a convention and features a few of these. The most prominent is Clifford Morgan, a fanboy who's oriented his entire life around a series of Conan the Barbarian-esque novels to a very unhealthy extent. He ends up murdering the novels' author after breaking into his hotel room and finding a "joke ending" for the next book where the hero is killed.

• Many of the books by Carlton Mellick III have a comic at the end, which often shows him arguing with an irrate reader who is complaining about some aspect of the book. Sometimes it seems to be this trope, though at other times the reader is implied to have a point.
• Doctor Who Novelisations: The novelisation of "Shada" turns both Skagra and (eventually) the Ship into this. Skagra is the classic ultra-negative, if-only-the-show-was-Darker and Edgier Fan Dumb type - he spends all his time watching video footage of the Doctor and rating the sets, effects, monsters and the Doctor's performance very low things out of ten, and particularly can't stand it when things are funny. The Ship is more of an Affectionate Parody Fangirl who appreciates the good moral lessons of the Doctor's adventures and enjoys a good Squee over how much she fancies him, but forces other people to watch them with her.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who has had one of the world's most notoriously Unpleasable Fanbases for decades, and some writers have let their feelings show:
  • "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" had a whiny, nerdy character named Whizzkid, who kept gushing about the eponymous circus, though he said he knew it wasn't as good as it used to be, before getting horribly murdered.
  • "Love & Monsters" also has elements of this, though more of the Affectionate Parody variety. Specifically, the human LINDA members were nice, friendly fans who hung out and had fun, while the Abzorbaloff was the Fan Dumb.
  • "The Runaway Bride" had a human villain, Lance, who is a particularly nasty and misanthropic intellectual snob who loathes pop culture, and who plots with an alien to destroy Earth just because the alien offered to take him to see the great sights of the universe. It's hard not to see him as a caricature of the vocal Space Opera fan element who criticised the Russell T Davies era of the show for having too many stories based around everyman characters and set in contemporary London, and too many pop culture jokes.
  • Also the "Time Crash" mini-episode, where the Fifth Doctor has a My Future Self and Me moment with Ascended Fanboy David Tennant as his tenth incarnation.
    5th Doctor: You're... oh no...
    10th Doctor: Here it comes, yeah, yeah, I am.
    5th Doctor: A fan.
    10th Doctor: What?!
    5th Doctor: How did you get in here? You're not one of those LINDA people are you? I can't have them knowing where I live.
  • "Planet of the Dead" features Professor Malcolm Taylor, who is also firmly in the Affectionate Parody camp. One particularly nice moment features the Doctor and Malcolm reminiscing about their favourite adventure from the Doctor's old "UNIT files".
  • Mark Gatiss and David Walliams did a sketch for BBC2's Doctor Who Night in which they both played Doctor Who fanboys who had kidnapped - and implicitly planned on raping - Peter Davison.
  • Slightly more subtly, "The Unquiet Dead" had the Doctor himself gushing to Charles Dickens about what a fan he is ... and then bitching about plot holes and padding until a bemused Dickens says "I thought you said you were a fan?"

• Nigel Kneale hated being considered a science fiction writer, and wrote an entire sitcom called Kinvig, which was devoted entirely to depicting SF fans as pathetic losers. It was a total ratings and critical failure, largely because of how bilious it was.
• On Lexx, the Flanderization of 790 into an epic Yandere who threw himself relentlessly at a disinterested Kai and was completely Axe-Crazy toward anyone else who showed Kai any attention was an obvious (and perhaps over-the-top) Take That! to Kai/Michael McManus's more, ahem, overwrought fans.
• Monk had Sarah Silverman on as Marci Maven, an obsessed fan who freaked out because her favorite TV show had changed its theme song. This was a jab at the fandom complaining about how the show had switched from its first-season Instrumental Theme Tune to the Randy Newman composition "It's a Jungle Out There". She later showed up and kept referring to Monk's cases by the episode names, which confused Monk. She was also a jab at some Monk-slash-Natalie fanfiction, as well as a few other types of Monk fanfiction.
• Those Two Guys on The Sean Cullen Show, who actually sat in the actual audience and complained about how improbable the plots were. Considering that one such episode featured a giant squid invading the basement while Sean took lessons in self-defense that involved avenging the death of his watermelon by beating up an ax-wielding "blue guy" and fighting off an entire band of ninjas, and then his evil Germanic Mad Scientist neighbour brainwashed William Shatner into attacking Sean before, but then Shatner got attacked by the squid and they both fell into a wormhole, and then Sean sang a song about it all while the blue guy danced... considering all that, complaining about the logic of the show was a fruitless pursuit.
• Done in the Sherlock episode "The Empty Hearse". The episode begins with with a somewhat ludicrous explanation of how Sherlock survived the previous season's Cliffhanger... before it is revealed the story was created by Anderson, who has set up a club for fans of Sherlock Holmes who believe he is still alive. Later we see a fairly creepy romantic moment between Sherlock and Moriarty that turns out to be a member's Slash Fic. When Sherlock finally does explain to Anderson how he did it, Anderson complains, "Not how I would have done it", listing all the internal inconsistencies in the explanation and refusing to believe him.
• Smallville:
  • An episode called "Action", where a fan of a comic book was sabotaging the set of a film adaptation because he didn't think they were doing it right.
  • In Season 8, after many years of saying "No, the Chlois Theory will NOT come true," the Smallville showrunners finally decided to have some fun spoofing this fan theory in the episode "Hex," to the annoyance of the Chlois theorists...but the utter delight of everyone else in the fan base, who were equally tired of the Chlois theory.
• Done REALLY blatantly in the Supernatural season four episode "The Monster at the End of This Book", where the Winchester brothers discover that a series of pulp novels (titled, you guessed it, Supernatural) has been chronicling their adventures; Sam goes on the internet and discovers their fandom. In addition to Sam's pointed comment that "For fans, they sure do complain a lot," the boys are horrified to learn about all the Shipping the series has apparently spawned.
  Dean: What's a slash fan?
  Sam: As in Sam, slash, Dean. Together.
  Dean: Like together together? They do know we're brothers, right?
  Sam: Doesn't seem to matter.
  Dean: Well, that's just sick!
  • Read more.
  • Don't forget Chuck's dialog at the end of season 5:
    "Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can. The fans are always gonna bitch. There's always gonna be holes. And since it's the ending, it's all supposed to add up to something. I'm telling you, they're a raging pain in the ass."
  • And then Becky, the Wincest-writing fangirl is introduced in Season 5. Then Sam and Dean go to a Supernatural Fan Convention where one of the panels discusses the "Homoerotic Subtext" between the characters.
• As odd as it sounds, The West Wing had an example of this. Following a semi-publicized incident where Aaron Sorkin got in a fight with his fans (and a fellow writer) on Television Without Pity, Sorkin wrote an episode called "The U.S. Poet Laureate", where Josh gets in a scuffle with a fan site devoted to him and the incident gets publicized. He refers to the site webmaster as "a dictatorial leader who [he's] sure wears a muu-muu and chain-smokes Parliaments." The episode got bonus ego points for having the U.S. Poet Laureate explain that her works meant to serve as a distraction, not to make any higher point. Of course, considering the real life site's policies about criticism on their forums, Sorkin's probably not all that wrong. It doesn't lessen how utterly petty the stunt was, but he's not wrong.

Music

• Cracker's hit "Get Off This" was basically one long Take That! from lead singer David Lowery to the fans of his old group, Camper Van Beethoven, who accused him of selling out. It characterizes these fans as "petty little ayatollahs" with "dirty hair and tittie-rings."
• Parodied with Dethklok's "Fan Song", which spends three minutes informing their fans how much they suck.
• Pet Shop Boys's single "Yesterday, When I was Mad" is a deadpan snark to fans who proclaim they understand the band's message more than any other people. The band is driven to such desperation as to:
  Admitting, I don't believe
  In anyone's sincerity, and that's what's really got to me
• Mansun's 'hidden track' on their Attack of the Grey Lantern album, called "An Open-Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter" was a piss-take of the sort of fans who would analyse their lyrics looking for meaning. Ironically, this was a song where the lyrics had a definite meaning and message:
  "They lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much/They're just a vehicle for a lovely voice"
• tool's "Hooker With A Penis" portrays a disgruntled fan who claims that the band has "sold out to the Man" with their latest songs. The band states apologetically that they "sold out" by sheer virtue of selling records, while the Coke-drinking, Vans-wearing, record-purchasing fan is a consumer without even realizing it.
• Many, many Eminem songs feature these characters, due to Eminem's resentment of his own fame and enjoyment of his malevolent Teen Idol status.
  • "Stan" features an obsessive fan who takes Eminem's songs way, way, too literally.
  • "The Way I Am" warns fans not to approach him while he's out and about with his family, or hassle him while he's taking a shit, and if they do, "I'm liftin' you ten feet... in the air - I don't care! Who was there! Or who just saw me just jaw you!"
  • In "Marshall Mathers", Eminem's fans keep knocking on his front door in the middle of the night and honking their horns at him. (This really happened - he had to sell his house at a loss and move to a gated community just to be able to sleep at night.)
  • "My Band" features numerous idiotic dudebro fans who don't understand who D12 are and view them as an extension of the main event, Slim Shady. Slim Shady, also a dudebro in this song, takes advantage of this to use the hot girl fans for sex while the bandmates complain.
  • In "Elevator", Slim Shady murders an entire elevatorful of these fans by welcoming them into his mansion and then cutting the lift cable.
  • "Bad Guy" features an obsessive fan getting his revenge on Eminem for the death of his brother Stan, who also represents former fans who have negatively reappraised Eminem for the homophobia of his early work.
  • In "So Far...", Slim's hassled by a fan in a service station bathroom who hands him some paper for him to sign while he's on the pot. He wipes his ass with it and hands it back to the fan, who thanks him.
  • In "The Ringer", Eminem gets a message from an "ex-fan" who mailed him a copy of The Marshall Mathers LP, telling him that if he gets back to that style, she'll love him (oooouuh!). He points out that due to the album's influence, if he did that he'd be "like everyone else in the fucking industry".
• Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was very uncomfortable with his songs achieving mainstream popularity, particularly among people he was attacking in his songs. "In Bloom" is a shot fired at hyper-masculine fans who like to sing along to the lyrics without realizing that they're being criticized.
• Marilyn Manson covered the unsavory (er, more unsavory) side of their fanbase in "This is the New Shit," as quoted on this wiki under Rated M for Money. In brief, it's about the fans who don't even try to understand what the songs are about, just cheering the "sex sex sex," violence, and rebellion.
• Pink Floyd explored this in The Wall during Pink's "Dark Lord" phase. "...And we're gonna find out where you fans really stand!"
• Ween has a song they only perform live called "Leave Deaner Alone" (warning: lyrics very NSFW), a song in which Dean Ween sings about his disdain for Ween's more obnoxious fans. Despite this, however, Deaner does seem to have an appreciation for most of his other fans because he keeps in touch with them on his blog when he's not touring and even favorited a couple Ween fan covers and fan-shot live bootleg videos on his Youtube channel.
• The Who's album, Tommy, has the titular character amass a cult of fans after becoming a pinball champion despite being deaf, dumb and blind (dumb meaning mute). It gets to the point where his fans basically ask him to be their spiritual leader after he gets his senses back. Depending on the adaptation, Tommy will either: a) Accept, believing that he can lead his fans to be their best selves, only for them to turn on him when they realize he isn't giving them an easy fix, or b) Refuse, explaining that they shouldn't want to be like him, to which his fans... still cruelly reject him.
  • The same album has "Sally Simpson", a song about a teenage fan who sneaks out to go to one of Tommy's meetings and attempting to climb on the stage to touch him. It doesn't end well for her. An obvious allegory for Tommy being a rock star, plus the song was originally a stand alone about a fan of a Jim Morrison expy.

Pro Wrestling

• Kenny King, Rhett Titus and Caprice Coleman tried to make their Cabinet's campaign to "Make Wrestling Great Again" look more popular than it really was by employing "fans" to chant for them at Ring of Honor events. The actual ticket buyers were not amused.
• The WWE pulled this with The Miz, who was used as a Take That! against fans who hated John Cena. He would mercilessly abuse Cena and the fans week after week, trying to goad the fan favorite into a match, and when Cena finally did take notice when they had been booked for a match Mix nearly wet himself, before being completely dominated. This would occur several more times before Miz's push.

Theater

• In Assassins, Sam Byck rants into a tape recorder on how desperately the world needs Silly Love Songs, and that he's going to fly a plane into the White House to show how much he cares. The message is ostensibly directed at Leonard Bernstein, but the lyrics he quotes are by Stephen Sondheim, composer of Assassins...
• Similarly, there's the host of art critics in Sunday in the Park with George who complain that artist George's work is growing stale and repetitive. Note that Sunday ... was the first show Sondheim wrote after the original production of Merrily We Roll Along was derided by critics who said that Sondheim's long-term partnership with Hal Prince had outstayed its welcome. Both the Sunday ... and Merrily ... examples are more Straw Critics.

Video Games

• Leonard from Monster Prom is meant as a Take That! towards the worst aspects of fandom. He constantly insults and belittles people for no reason other than to be a jerk, and he's also bigoted towards Zoe, deadnaming her as "Z'Gord" and refusing to acknowledge her transition. This attitude is explicitly written to draw parallels to Fan Dumb and transphobia, and to make him into a foil for Zoe, as she is meant to show all of fandom's positive aspects (like creativity, passion, and respect for a creator's ambitions).
• The Elder Scrolls
  • The series has M'aiq^note (pronounced my-eek) the Liar, a recurring Easter Egg Legacy Character. M'aiq is a known a Fourth-Wall Observer (and Leaner and Breaker) who voices the opinions of the series' creators and developers, largely in the form of Take Thats, to both the audience (given the ES Unpleasable Fanbase) and isn't above above taking some at Bethesda itself. Most of his comments are jokes about, rebuts, and insults toward fan complaints about elements which were changed or not included in the current game, some of which are in past installments.
  • Oblivion has the devoted fanboy you pick up when you become Grand Champion of the Imperial City Arena, who is essentially a strawman for every overenthusiastic fan who won't take the hint to go away and die somewhere. If the idea was to drive home how annoying such a person can be, it worked... fans of the game have a long and noble history of finding horrible things to do to him.
  • Skyrim uses a similar fanboy for another Take That!. If the Dark Brotherhood missions are played, you learn that one of the assassins once killed a Grand Champion by disguising himself an annoying fan.
• The Puyo Puyo series had Choppun, an Affectionate Parody of the more diehard fans of the series. Choppun is a guy who Cosplays as Arle Nadja, except Choppun has a paper bag over his head. He's also crossdressing, since Arle Nadja is the female main character of the series.
• Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel had an old man that peed in the main character's empty Nuka-Cola bottles. He was named after one of the (now-ex) admins of No Mutants Allowed, the Fallout forum that defines Unpleasable Fanbase for gamers.
  • Fallout 2 had the "Unwashed Villagers fighting a spammer" rare encounter, where the aforementioned Villagers beat up an annoying spammer, Grim, who keeps whining and making absurd suggestions for the game. ("I want a tank!") Both the Villagers and the spammer are based on real-life forum members from back in the day, and the Unwashed Villagers were known for their positive contributions, while Grim was... not.
• Pokémon has been doing this since the Gold/Silver days. The Poké Maniac and Poké Fan trainer types (among others) are usually given dialogue that cements them as parodies of some of the franchise's more unhinged fans. Later games took this a step further by including the Poké Kids, a class of young trainers who all cosplay as Pokémon^note The original iteration of the class, seen in Diamond and Pearl, featured only girls dressed as Pikachu; in Sword and Shield the class was brought back and now features boys dressed as Pikachu and girls dressed as Eevee, and claim that their lifelong dream is to grow up to become one.
• Francis from Super Paper Mario is a Stereotypical Nerd who kindaps Peach, takes her on a Dating Sim-like escapade, and does some in-universe Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch. For the latter, you have to answer in the affirmative that you do the same just to get into his room. In one of his private rooms, you can find and read this "Geeklog" entry:
  Geeklog Date: 11.26
  Mood: Ranty
  
  The sun is bright outside so I'm going to stay in and watch "The Blubbening".
  Season One has better writing and voice acting than the later seasons.
  I mean, COME ON. Everything went totally downhill after the big dream sequence.
  Still, the animation in the scenes where Tubba Blubba battles robots is schweet.
  Season Three was obviously just a vehicle for selling action figures and vehicles!
  I never understood why they changed the sound effect when the princess appears.
  It was "Deet-dinga-deet-ling!" then suddenly it was "dinga-deet-dinga-ling!"
  As if no one would notice! Pffft! True fans care about important stuff about that.
  They should totally run the show without commercials and let fans suggest story lines!
  That's what fans want, and we're the only ones that matter.
  I guess I'll still buy "The Blubbening" box set. The preorder bonus is a costume!
  While I wait for it to come, I'll go online and tell everyone it's stupid.
• Many players of the Team Fortress 2 fanbase were very vocal about just how awful it was that the developers were putting all their effort into releasing totally useless cosmetic items in lieu of actual content. Valve released a blog post which allowed the fanbase to understand what really goes on behind the scenes. This quickly turns into more of a shot at themselves though, with the poor fanboy being Only Sane Man in an office filled with cosmetic-obsessed, hat-loving lunatics.
  • Doubles as a Hilarious in Hindsight since hats are now insanely popular to the point where they are a meme generator.
• World of Warcraft includes a quest in the revamped, post-Cataclysm Azeroth in the undead area where the PC takes on the role of a questgiver and hands out three quests to various computer-programmed NPC players. All three are digs at various groups of fans: the "Kingslayer" (character who killed the Lich King) who can't play, the total noob and "Johnny Awesome", decked out in full heirloom equipment (items which can only be bought by people who had a max-level character in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion) and riding Sparklepony. All three then make an appearance in the Hillsbrad area of the game as mercenary computer-controlled aides — or rescue objects — to the PC.
• Norimaro, a Japan-only Guest Fighter in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, is a stereotypical Otaku who got in the ring by mistake and is now aspiring to take Chun Li's picture.
• The main character of Arthur's Nightmare is an angry adult fan of Arthur and other PBS Kids shows, if the ending is to be believed, who begins the game with a rant on the show's switch to Flash animation. He is then subject to a game-length Nightmare Sequence where Arthur and the rest of the Read family is out to kill him.

Web Animation

• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan video Elements of Cringe features a group of bronies crossing over into Equestria to drain their magic and turn into their Original Characters, while showing no actual empathy towards the ponies or world they claim to be fans of.
• Llamas with Hats eventually became centered around this. The creator, Jason Steele, was originally making the series to have five episodes, but as he explains, when people were expecting the series to end at episode 5 with Carl blowing up the Earth, this embarrassed him greatly because that is when he noticed that what he was planning had become predictable, so the series had ended at episode 4 for several years. But when the audience demanded a continuation, Jason decided to show that audience exactly what happens when you beat a dead horse to the ground. Paul, who now represents the audience, doesn't have the same kind of reaction that he initially used to have, and this starts to upset Carl, who wanted that kind of reaction. After Paul leaves him, Carl attempts to replace him by placing a mask of Paul's face on a sheep—by continuing the series, it loses its charm and doesn't take its role seriously. As this is happening, the credits jingle is becoming more and more distorted. By episode 9, Carl is talking to himself, trying to get some kind of reaction, pretending that he has an audience, the result of the creator doing the same thing over and over again. Suddenly, the mask of Paul comes to life and urges him to finish his work—the audience comes back, but it's meaningless, with no life or substance to it. After Carl destroys the entire world, he realises that through his efforts to impress Paul and get him to react the way that he used to he ended up killing him in the process, the true audience that liked the show for what it once was was dead. Carl tried so desperately to get the initial reaction he got from the audience, but he unintentionally kills that same audience. So he finishes his work by commiting suicide, thus killing the show.

Webcomics

• Bob and George author Dave Anez used an obscure minor character for this purpose in this strip and the next, in order to hang a lampshade on a small plothole he didn't care about. (One of the comic's running jokes was Dave's insistence that there were no plotholes; if you thought you saw one, you'd find out sooner or later why it made sense. And indeed, he always went to great lengths to close the big ones. This wasn't a big one.)
• At least half of the humor in Shortpacked! comes from various Straw Fans of the various franchises and hobbies he follows. Some are recurring characters, some only show up once, but it's clear that Willis has an axe to grind with certain sections of fandoms in general. Sometimes certain fans in particular. When someone's been annoying Willis on his toy message boards, he's not very subtle about doing a comic about them. (The "I knew about that!" guy strip being the best example.) Some of the strips are near-verbatim from discussions at the Allspark (Transformers) message boards or similar. Willis even occasionally parodies his own fan madness.
• Likewise, the Insecticomics often uses interactions between the Transformers and either a fanboy or a fangirl (or occasionally both) to deliver a Take That! to the more irritating ideologies of the Transformers fandom.
• Davan and Jason's meeting the catgirls of Something*Positive, complete with long rant by authorial stand-in. Randy probably just wants to scare away the 'bad' audience (as opposed to the good audience, which he's adamant is most of the readers). Milholland also created a strip in Super Stupor about a superhero whose power is essentially retconning, and used that to take a jab at comic book creators who try to force the comics to be like they were when they were young, Joe. The strip also decried people who get their opinions from a site called TVTropes.com (most likely a knock-off of our great and glorious wiki) rather than forming their own. There was another poking fun at some of Harry Potter's older fans taking things too seriously (Based on a real incident about a midnight release costume contest)
• Broken Plot Device has the "Idea Man", an obese penguin wearing kitty ears and a matching tail who, as the name implies, is the sole source of weird, offensive, and downright perverted ideas for the character's in Lizardbeth's in-comic comic.
• This comic of Our Little Adventure where they fight a troll who accuses the comic of being an Order of the Stick ripoff.
• Conversed by cartoonist Andrew Dobson regarding the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Dobson argues that the Kylo Ren character is a satire of the more toxic elements of the fandom:
  Dobson: ...he's a whiny, selfish, old-school worshiping, angry cosplayer. And when he throws tantrums, that's Disney saying...
  Mickey Mouse: "This is YOU."

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic's "most obnoxious fan", Douchey McNitpick, in his "Top 11 F*ck Ups" video. The Critic has stated that he doesn't mind fans sending him criticism and complaints, just that they shouldn't be obnoxious about it. As such, Douchey is still a Straw Fan, but rather nicer than some examples. Douchey gets his revenge in the "Willy Wonka vs. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" video. It's not many creators who'd give their Straw Fans that kind of satisfaction.
  • In "Next Top 11 F*ck Ups", he was less obnoxious, shutting up whenever the Critic yelled at him, and more pathetic, being shown to live with his mother, is hinted at being a crossdresser, and has masturbated to pictures of the Green M&M.
  • He also got some satisfaction in the "You're A Dirty Rotten Bastard" special, where Spoony is The Nostalgia Critic instead and Douchey adores him. The real Critic apparently just sucks that much.
  • He plays the same when appearing The Nostalgia Chick's review of The Fifth Element, giving obnoxious voice to fans saying she should stick to reviewing girly stuff and complaining over her definition of a MacGuffin, before telling her "I'm still going to mastubate to your picture tonight!"
  • Douchey has shown up twice on Atop the Fourth Wall. Once to deride Linkara for mistakes he's made (Linkara later used magic to teleport to his house and beat him) and again for calling him a rip-off for doing an episode on comic book advertisements.
  • As of The Review Must Go On, they had to find a person with no life who would not be missed, and who will obsess over every mistake and continuity error they see, to keep the Plot Hole stable. Two guesses who gets the job.
• Happens a lot in the Homestar Runner universe, to the point where one could say half of the recent content is thoroughly dedicated to this trope. They even made an entire skit discussing fandoms in general, and, while their attacks weren't all directed at their own Fan Dumb, a good deal of it applies.
• Due to Matt Wilson's Creator Backlash, Bonus Stage had moments where he really hated his fans, especially the wiki. The greatest example is probably in episode 80, "The Terror From Beyond Imageshack", in which a wide variety of actual art from fans were made into characters and mocked for their inability to make sense or original content. They were eventually all removed, except for "the Bonus Stage Wiki Guy" (who was admittedly a comedically accurate portrayal).
  Bonus Stage Wiki Guy: "And here Phil is referring to the Bonus Stage wiki. Or he may be referring to the Korean MMORPG "Wiki", which was canned because its graphics were eerily similar to Zelda. Happy birthday, Phil!"
  • To explain the above quote, the Bonus Stage Wiki was filled with random speculation. With a show like Bonus Stage that frequently makes pop culture references, a wiki would seem like a good idea... unfortunately, many of its contributors just couldn't come to a general consensus as to what Matt was referencing, so comments along the lines of "X is a reference to Y. Or, it could be a reference to Z." were fairly common. It's not surprising that he didn't think too highly of the site.
• In The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the Atari 2600 game The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a character shows up who starts harassing the Nerd with "did you know" questions that he's heard before, questions about when stuff is coming out, and requests for advice on how to create a ripoff series.
  • This character is in fact based on Chop-Top from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - who harassed a radio DJ with much of the same act.
• RedLetterMedia has one for fans of the Mr. Plinkett Reviews, Palpy or Man-in-a-Black-Cloak-who-is-not-a-trademarked-character-of-Lucas-Limited. He calls Plinkett lazy for not putting out enough reviews and he hates Christopher Nolan and demands Plinkett review his movies, if not children's films or obscure movies. There also comments and tweets made by unnamed characters. One time, Mr. Plinkett himself asks "Enough of this sellout crap! When's the next Plinkett review?! Oh, Wait!, I'm me."
• The Warp Zone: "Is The Last Jedi Bad? (Fanboy Court)" features two opposing Straw Fans going head-to-head; one who doesn't think the film lives up to the original trilogy and another who refuses to accept that Star Wars has flaws.
• A reoccurring character in the short-lived Wisenheimers is Christian, an overweight 11-year-old boy who frequently obsesses over the focus character of Wacky Game Jokez, 4 Kidz!, Mickey the Dick, prominently based on a listener who previously submitted fan mail to the show. Christian is subsequently Driven to Suicide after being rejected by Mickey on numerous occassions, only before returning in a later episode as a ghost.

Western Animation

• The New Kids on the Block cartoon, of all shows, had a character named Fanny. She and her friends were the very personification of NKOTB Fan Dumb of the time.
• The Simpsons's Comic Book Guy: Though he was originally just the standard nerd, when the show crossed into Long Runner territory, he would often mock the large section of the fanbase that think the show isn't good anymore, but still watch it religiously anyway. CBG's catch phrase actually originated from a usenet post which complained about an episode from Season Four. To put things in perspective, Season 4 of The Simpsons is now widely thought to be part of the show's "golden age".
  • In the Regina Monologues, JK Rowling expresses her annoyance of fans asking about the ending to the Harry Potter series^note This was before Half-Blood Prince was published:
    Rowling: (rolls eyes) He grows up and marries you! Is that what you want to hear?
    Lisa: (dreamy) Yes.
• The Futurama episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" paints the entire Star Trek: The Original Series fandom as this. People became so obsessed with the show in the future, that the fandom became a major religion. Eventually, it was toppled, with all of its followers being thrown into a volcano. After the final copies of the show's tapes were launched into space, and landed on a desolate planet, the energy being Melllvar (the planet's sole resident) watched the tapes over and over again for centuries, turning him into a straw fan. He is what causes the show's cast to crash land on his planet after they leave Earth, and intends to have them act out his fan scripts until time stops.
• Freakazoid! had Fanboy, who could only be escaped by directing him to a different franchise to obsess over.
• Animaniacs had the "Please, Please, Please Get a Life Foundation", a support group for overly-obsessed fans, particularly of the Internet variety. What makes it even more disturbing is that it was largely based on a real guy, one Dennis Falk, the production team had encountered while working on Tiny Toon Adventures. Not only that, it was significantly toned down from the real thing. Tress MacNeille, Babs' voice actress had to cancel several convention appearances near his hometown because he had sent several very creepy fanletters that gave them reason to believe he would try to rape her.
  • The fans' actual dialogue was taken almost verbatim from a document maintained by the Internet fandom community called the Cultural Reference Guide to Animaniacs. The community responded by accepting the cartoon as Affectionate Parody.
• The Fillmore! episode "The Unseen Reflection" featured some fans of a young-adult sci-fi fantasy book series who took it far, far too seriously. This particular episode is a good skewering of fans and fandoms in general, complete with Fandom Rivalry and the MST3K Mantra.
  • However, the episode also took the time to skewer the author as well. It was justified in that she legitimately did not care about her fans or the books, stating she wrote the latest one, which turned out to be horrible plot-wise and grammatically, on a plane to Milan.
• The Collector in Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. is a parody of (what else) comic and action figure collectors, dismissing Hulk and Ultimate Spider-Man for bein 'menaces rather than heroes', but then turning to look at all his 'variants' (yes, he calls them variants) of Hulk (blue, red, barbarian and girl), and when Hulk and Spidey free the other Hulks, he cries:
  The Collector: My heroes - out of their packaging!

• Total Drama:
  • Sierra knows your dental records.
  • Kelsey, a fangirl from the 2nd aftermath show of Action, who has a Trent doll was actually inspired by a real life fangirl who had a doll of Cody (which Sierra coincidentally has a obsessive stalker crush on).

• The two-part episode of Justice League focusing on expies of '40s superheroes is surprisingly respectful to both the characters and their fans, but it also argues that their time is gone. The villain turns out to be a Reality Warper who couldn't accept that his heroes had died, and reanimated them to fight endlessly in a perpetually static world. Ultimately, they themselves fight and kill him to end the cycle and allow change, even though it means they will cease to exist as well. Oh, and his name is Ray Thompson, which is totally not a reference to the guy who was writing the 40s heroes in the 80s.
  • Becomes somewhat Hilarious in Hindsight when you considered what went on at DC shortly after.
• On Adventure Time, the Ice King turns out to be one at the end of "Fionna and Cake," which is actually just a Rule 63 Fanfic he wrote. Finn also takes a turn as one during "All the Little People," an episode-long critique of the excesses of Shipping.
• Bat-Mite turns into this at the end of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, sadly tossing aside his previous characterization (and development) in the process.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: Collectimus. A big-headed, tantrum-throwing, sedentary, nasally-voice alien with Nerd Glasses, he is presented as a parody of fans of Alien Force and Ultimate Alien. Professing himself to be Ben 10's biggest fan, he is obsessed with Ben 10 trivia and merchandise, specifically "collecting" the latter. However, he disregards the "real" Ben, complaining that the world of Omniverse should be Darker and Edgier and showing interest only in items from when Ben was younger and from a low quality Animesque knock-off.
• Sonic Boom had one who was also a Loony Fan who took Sonic in after accidentally putting him in a full body cast. Among other things, he argued with Sonic about his own life and made him role play one of his fan fictions (his only "family friendly" one, with Sonic playing Tails). The whole thing is a parody of Stephen King's Misery. In an amusing inversion, Sonic points out that he's the first to not criticize everything Sonic does.
• Sarah G. Lato from The Amazing World of Gumball who writes fanfiction and tries to invoke tropes on the main characters. In "The Shippening" she even finds a magic book that makes her fanfiction become canon.

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The episode "Fame & Misfortune" has Twilight deciding to publish the Friendship Journals, which results in her and her friends becoming international celebrities. Rarity is boycotted by a crowd of fans who find her entries annoying, Applejack gets an entire mob of Loony Fans who expect to be treated like her family, Fluttershy is attacked by people complaining about her Aesop Amnesia, Pinkie Pie is reduced to a punchline with people laughing mindlessly at everything she says, Rainbow Dash is expected to tell the same stories over and over and accused of "disappointing her fans" when she gets tired of it. A large mob crowds around the castle at the end, arguing over which pony was best, who had the strongest friendship etc and one memorably saying "Twilight was better before she got wings!"

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