Take That, Audience!

As if hearing Bouapha explode into Ludicrous Gibs isn't enough.^note His remains are near the top-left corner of the screen.

"We did the rather cruel thing of destroying a fanboy. There was a lot of laughter on the set when we finally executed that fucker, I can tell you! Well justified."

— Andrew Cartmel on Doctor Who, "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy"

Aiming a jab at the audience, usually for being such losers that they'll waste their time watching/reading/playing this nonsense, such moral degenerates that they'll enjoy sleazy pandering to their base impulses, and/or so dumb they'll pay good money for it. In pinballs, video games, and other similar works, this extends to mocking the player's lack of skill.

Not to be confused with This Loser Is You (an audience-identification figure who is so pathetic that the audience doesn't want to), What the Hell, Player? (the game notes bizarre or cruel behavior), or You Bastard! (where a work tries to make the audience feel guilty for enjoying it or choosing to consume it). Straw Fan is a subtrope where the audience is personified by a character in the work. Usually tied up with Self-Deprecation, possibly saying that the creator is a talentless hack who got lucky or is just in it to squeeze money out of the fans, but they're too dumb to realise it. Compare with Biting-the-Hand Humor, where the show mocks their paymasters, such as the network or publishers, as well as how some of these examples attack the very people who are paying for or watching the product. May also overlap with Easy-Mode Mockery if a video game makes fun of the player for playing the game on the easiest difficulty setting, with Achievement Mockery if achievements are awarded for the player screwing up, or Completion Mockery for just completing part of a game (if not the whole game) in general when it isn't necessary to win.

Subtrope of Write Who You Hate. This is usually just a friendly ribbing; it's rare for the creator to actually hate the fans and try to drive them away. However, it is sometimes combined with Artist Disillusionment. This is sometimes a result of a Trolling Creator—but if it goes along with a Dear Negative Reader, look out! Can overlap with The Diss Track if it's a song.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cross Ange: Big Bad Embryo is typically considered to be an Audience Surrogate for the Otaku audience, in particular his habit of becoming enamored with women and lavishing them with praise and attention until they either stop being useful to him or he finds a new girl that he likes more, at which point he callously discards the former subject of his affections. He also has a strong obsession with female chastity, another common part of otaku culture, and grows furious at the thought of a woman he's currently smitten with having sex with other men. The show isn't shy about repudiating these bad habits, and presents them as a big part of what makes Embryo such a Hate Sink.
• Dragon Ball Super:
  • When Whis is explaining to Goku and Vegeta who Zeno is and how he rules the multiverse, Goku asks Whis how strong Zeno is. Whis criticizes how Saiyans have a bad habit of judging people base on their strength.
  • Episode 52 shows Gohan living his life with his family and Future Trunks' reactions to it. Instead of being upset or disappointed that Gohan is no longer the badass he remembers from the Cell Games, he's happy and envious of Gohan for being able to live his dream, while his happiness was viciously stolen from him. This can be seen as a commentary on the fandom who wants Gohan to be an all-powerful badass again, even wants Gohan to lose his entire family to provide motivation, and thought that Trunks would lecture Gohan for getting weaker and tell him how important it is for him to train. Future Trunks is everything the fandom wishes Gohan was, and he's an extremely unhappy and damaged person from all the trauma he's been forced to suffer through.
  • For fans who always wanted to see Vegeta go Super Saiyan 3 in canon, Future Trunks asks Vegeta to fight at full power and become a Super Saiyan 3 like Goku. Vegeta laughs and then transforms into a Super Saiyan Blue.
• Yuu Watase, the author of Fushigi Yuugi had gotten many letters from fangirls bemoaning Miaka's (and sometimes Yui's) idiocy and expressing their desires to go into The Universe of the Four Gods, become the priestess, and get a Bishōnen boyfriend because they felt they could do a better job. In response to them, Watase created the 3rd OVA protagonist Mayo Sakaki. She is a Clingy Jealous Girl with a bad case of Moral Myopia who deliberately goes into the book with the express purpose of stealing Taka away from Miaka and tries to launch a smear campaign against the latter. During her tenure as priestess, she does absolutely nothing for the benefit of the rapidly declining Konan Empire and treats the position like a game. To drive this home even further, Taka wants absolutely nothing to do with her and she is called out for her bratty attitude at every possible opportunity.
  Lady: You're supposed to purify yourself before entering the shrine!
  Mayo: Get into that dirty old open air bath? Forget it!
  Lady: But it's the only place in the capital where you can get replenishing hot water!
  Mayo: Forget it!
  Lady: I have to admit, you do keep yourself pretty clean anyway. Lady Miaka was always dirty from running around in the countryside with the Suzaku Seven.
• The Geek Ex-Hitman: A significant percentage of the series consists of the manga affectionately poking fun at anime otaku via the main cast's obsession with Hades Girl Eurydice (an In-Universe Magical Girl anime), from connventions to the Serious Business that is merch collection.
• Gundam:
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket is a violent, visceral Deconstruction of the brand, and a condemnation of war in general. The final episode features a fairly pointed Take That! along the lines of "Glad you enjoyed the violence, you sick bastards! Bet you can't wait for the next Gundam show so you can revel in the bloodshed there, too!"
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn contains one for those who consider Char to be a Draco in Leather Pants. In Episode 4, Audrey meets an elderly bartender who discusses Char's actions during Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, and the man states that Well-Intentioned Extremist or not, any person who would try to commit genocide (even in the name of "saving humanity") is still an asshole and A Nazi by Any Other Name.
  • Gundam Build Divers has this with Big Bad Tsukasa Shiba who hates the Gunpla Battle Nexus Online game because it overshadowed Gunpla Duel, a game that allowed people to battle with real Gunpla, inflicting actual battle damage to them. To Tsukasa, those who play GBN are not real Gunpla Battlers as their type of fight holds no weight or stakes. This can come off as this trope towards elitist Gundam fans and especially fans of Gundam Build Fighters who derided Gundam Build Fighters Try for that exact reason.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers features personified nations. It pokes fun at each nation and its people. So, if you live in a country represented by a Hetalia character, it has insulted you. Fans don't seem to mind.
• The very first scene of Joshiraku's anime adaption takes a pot shot at people who tend to watch anime for free on the internet.
  Tetora: Well, at least we'll have more viewers than we do readers.
  Kukuru: Though most of them will be watching it for free. A shopper who doesn't buy anything is just a window shopper.
• Naruto:
  • Sakura's infamous fake love confession to Naruto, who'd harbored an unrequited crush on her since their days at the academy, in Chapter 469 reads like a bullet list of all the oft-cited reasons why they should be together. Apart from Lee (who also has an unrequited crush on Sakura) being momentarily surprised, no one buys it for a moment, least of all Naruto, who reflects on all the times he's aware of that Sakura showed how she loved Sasuke. Naruto's flabbergasted reaction to it ("I hate people who lie to themselves!") very suspect of being this trope in action.
  • Kakashi describing Sakura as a kind person and defending her persistent feelings for Sasuke—saying that, unlike hate, love doesn't need to be justified—could be interpreted as Kishimoto's own defense of Sakura against common fan criticisms alleging she is a shallow bitch whose love for Sasuke is a bad thing. If translations are correct, the author himself apparently expressed concern with Sakura's reception among audiences.
  • The two-page manga short released as a tie-in to the Canon movie The Last: Naruto the Movie contains a subtle jab to an infamous Naruto/Sakura doujinshi: In the latter after Sakura confesses to Naruto that she's gotten over Sasuke and now loves Naruto, it ends with Sakura explicitly stating that on their first date she wants to go to a nice restaurant and definitely not to Ichiraku. The two-page manga short has Naruto and Hinata on their first date, with Naruto at first trying to take her to an expensive restaurant, but upon noticing that the frantic Naruto is short on cash, Hinata then suggests going to Ichiraku instead.
  • The Post-Script Season, Naruto Gaiden makes a very pointed jab to the people that both disliked the Sasuke/Sakura pairing and actually suggested that Karin was Sarada's mother instead of Sakura by dealing with the real possibility of Sarada being Karin's daughter, even using a DNA test to confirm this. But in the end it turns out Sakura is indeed Sarada's mother, and not only that, but Karin mentions also being good friends with Sakura.
• Many parts of Neon Genesis Evangelion, especially the infamous masturbation scene from End of Evangelion. This is even more blatant if you buy the interpretation that Shinji is meant to be a stand-in for the fanboys in the audience.
• Osomatsu-san: The second season opens up with the Matsuno brothers becoming a sensation among girls, much like real life, but they're all completely blind to how narcissistic, crude, and just plain disgusting they are. And overall, no matter the quality of what they put out, everyone's just looking to make a quick buck and don't much care how it's seen to others.
• Re:CREATORS makes a direct reference to fandom's What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic? habit in the scene when Alisteria abducts her creator and asks him what messages and meaning are in the manga she came from. When he can't answer, she realizes that the fans themselves have endowed his works with the meaning that Sota talked about earlier in the episode. There is no need to say how silly and pathetic this point is being made by Sota, who is effectively an Audience Surrogate at that point. Subverted as the series goes on, though, as fandom interpretation becomes central to how reality works for the Creations and is treated as just as important as, if not more important than, the author's original intent.
  • The endgame veers back into it, though: The reason Altair is practically invincible and gains New Powers as the Plot Demands? The fandom loves her too much for her to be permanently taken out. That's right, the heroes are on the brink of defeat because the audience is too busy Rooting for the Empire. She even pulls out real-world fanart of her to illustrate her point.
• Re:Zero, especially in later arcs, is a Take That! at the fanboys and NEET otaku that gobble up Trapped in Another World LN stories, with Subaru in their position. Subaru's monologue that he had plenty of time to achieve something important in his life, but he wasted this time without any good reason, after which he realizes his feelings for virtually the most important person in his life only after he rejected fan's favorite Rem recognition and she falls into a coma at the end of the third arc of the novel are seen in particular to be the one of the biggest examples to date.
• In the Slayers: The Road of The Ring manga, the nine Nazgûls turn out to be a Xellos fanclub who are diminishing his strength with their love. When Lina points out his body is a disguise, they reply they've "just fallen in love with the character." Then this happens:
  Fangirl: Let's send insulting messages to the town's tabloid!
  Fangirl: We don't mind the risk, insulting someone anonymously from a safe position is the best!!
  Lina: I don't want to see you anymore!! [blasts them away]
• "Lum's Stormtroopers", a gang of four Ascended Extras in the 1981 anime adaptation of Urusei Yatsura, are widely considered to be a mockery of the fanboys who drooled over Lum, who was originally intended to be a beautiful antagonist before her popularity prompted Rumiko Takahashi to reinvent her as the series' co-protagonist.
• The anime-exclusive character Vivian Wong from Yu-Gi-Oh! is one directed towards cliches seen in Original Character fanfiction. She is a famous duelist renowned for her beauty and a Fangirl for male characters like Yugi and Kaiba, hoping to form a Battle Couple with one of them, but is hostile towards Anzu/Téa and Rebecca just for being near Yugi. The girls in-universe are annoyed with her hostility, and Yugi, one of the guys she is interested in, feels awkward and annoyed with her obsession with him.

Comic Books

• The 2000 AD comic "Escape from Armageddon" had a bizarre form of this. Most of the comic is a fairly standard sci-fi heroic space fantasy, with The Chosen One tasked by the gods to defeat his Evil Twin who is blatantly Satan and gains a svelte love interest along the way. At the end, after the hero defeats the omnicidal demonic villain, the "gods" reveal themselves to be upper-dimensional D&D nerds and the whole universe is part of a sick game they're playing. The hero calls them out on their dickery and letting whole planets perish for their amusement before he is simply thrown back in time so he and his lover become the new Adam and Eve.
• Discussed and in some ways inverted in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, which features an issue towards the end where Animal Man confronts his "writer", an Author Avatar of Morrison themselves, to chew them out for all the horrible things that have happened in his life lately. "The Writer" notes that Animal Man's just a fictional character, and that the audience simply wouldn't be interested in what happened to him if Animal Man didn't have difficult circumstances to overcome and some kind of emotional reaction or stake in them. However, while this might just come off as a typical "blame the audience" moment, the Writer then goes on to muse that, as the creator, they're ultimately the one directly responsible for inflicting such pain on Animal Man, and for slightly questionable reasons as simply pursuing market trends rather than it being necessary for the story.
• The Avengers (Jason Aaron):
  • The War of the Realms tie-in sees Ulik used as a stand-in for the critics of the "Jane Foster as Thor" era.
  • Issue 20 was an Author Tract against those who hated how She-Hulk was handled since Civil War II.
• From A-Babies vs. X-Babies:
  "So, yeah, you're buying a book where babies fight babies. What does that say about you?"
• The very first issue of Captain America and the Mighty Avengers opens with a montage of reactions concerning the new, black Captain America. One of the people featured is a Fox News type who complains about how this is all just a stunt to "appease the social justice crowd", mirroring the frequent outrage comic fans have towards the Affirmative-Action Legacy trope.
• Daredevil (Mark Waid): When the Punisher's new apprentice is cornered by Hornhead, she gives a small rant about how the only people who are actually serious about being heroes are those who've suffered tragedy. DD chews her out and gives a long rant about how he finds this line of thinking disgusting as, while he himself has suffered tragedy (in fact, probably more tragedy than any other character in comics), he finds the idea that doctors, police officers, fire fighters, and heroes who are heroes because they want to do good are somehow not as heroic as he is just plain disrespectful and appalling to think. It's almost definitely an Author Filibuster aimed at fans who think that the only interesting heroes are the Darker and Edgier, angsty, miserable sort, which is a line of thinking that Mark Waid is well-known for hating with a passion, but the speech is still pretty awesome and befitting Daredevil's character.
• Grant Morrison's Flex Mentallo takes a shot at readers (and by extension writers and editors) who think that edgy comic books are the only kind with any value. The finale of the series has one of the characters claim that only immature adolescents think something being Darker and Edgier automatically makes it better.
• In Fungus The Bogeyman, Raymond Briggs describes comic strips as "A form of entertainment for the simple-minded".
• In the first Great Lakes Avengers, Squirrel Girl and Grasshopper appear in an offstage prologue. Grasshopper says, "The only people reading comics now are overweight thirty-year-olds living in their mother's basement." Squirrel Girl's sidekick replies in an inset: "Hey, fanboys, don't take that lying down! Write angry letters to Marvel today!"
• Howard the Duck has a back-up story where Howard meets two irate superhero impersonators who complain about how hard it is to be a white male in their line of business, because all those pesky women and minorities keep stealing all good superhero identities.
• Superboy-Prime in Infinite Crisis and Countdown to Final Crisis has been all but a big middle finger to obsessive comic book nerds who were constantly complaining about how the DCU was better "before" and how everything should be back like it used to be. In hindsight, Geoff Johns actually delivered this message with much greater subtlety than the writers of the infamously-bad Countdown, who ironically only ended up inadvertently showing off how badly the character was being written by them. Adventure Comics exaggerated it, while adding some self-aware humor and good-natured Lampshade Hanging, due to Geoff writing the character again.
• The plot of Issue 50 of Invader Zim (Oni) is a deliberate jab at people who'd rather Zim and Dib drop the rivalry and be friendly towards one another, by having these opinions be voiced (and enacted) by the crazy and forceful antagonist of the issue, Chammy Whamboo. Zim and Dib both find her annoying and creepy, and in the end they do team up, but only long enough to banish her to another planet, then go back to fighting each other.
• Iznogoud: The passworded dungeon in "The Magic Sceptre". Of course, it ends with Iznogoud forgetting the password, being trapped in there, desperately testing all permutations, and snapping at the reader: "So do YOU remember it? And no turning back pages!"
• Jem and the Holograms (IDW):
  • Roxy hates social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. The series has a heavy Tumblr fanbase and attracts the type of fans who use said social sites. It's also a joke against Sophie Campbell, as she uses Tumblr.
  • One issue of the Misfits spin-off is both this and an Author Tract against people who dislike Stormer's new design being significantly heavier than her original incarnation. When an executive at a TV station the Misfits are doing a reality show on suggests Stormer lose weight as a hook for the series, she angrily, well, storms off and says she refuses to lose weight. Pizazz meanwhile, refuses to participate in the show unless they take Stormer as-is, forcing the executive to capitulate. This is on top of numerous flashbacks and asides showing various people and the public mocking Stormer for her weight and Pizzaz essentially telling her to ignore anyone who tells her to lose weight.
• In Grant Morrison's JLA (1997) run, Triumph angrily complains about how the public only cares about the A-list members of the team like Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman, and how the lesser-known heroes get treated like crap no matter how hard they try. His criticisms could easily apply to the fans in the real world who only read comics starring recognizable, popular heroes, while refusing to give a chance to newer or more obscure characters.
• The very first issue of the New 52's Justice League International has a character calling a bunch of protestors "nothing but a bunch of Basement Dwellers who spend all day whining on the 'Net. Not a single open-minded one in the bunch." However, Booster Gold admonishes him and says that it's their job to prove the protestors wrong.
• The original Justice League International had this as well. There were a lot of old school Justice League fans who disliked the series' Genre Shift into comedy, so the writers brought in Hawkman as an Audience Surrogate who would constantly complain about the how he missed the "good old days".
• The Flash writer Mark Waid took over the book a few years after Wally West had replaced Barry Allen, but even by the early '90s, he was still getting fan-mail demanding that they bring Barry Allen back. In the ultimate case of "be careful what you wish for", Mark brought Barry Allen back... only for him to be a complete monster who hated Wally for attempting to "replace him as the Flash" and demanded that everyone refer to him as the One True Flash. As an extra layer of insult, this "Barry Allen" was really Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, who was revealed to be a complete Barry Allen fanboy. And by "fanboy", we mean that Thawne obsessively read everything he could about Barry, had himself surgically altered to look like him, knew every bit of trivia about Barry's life, and murdered someone to get his hands on the Cosmic Treadmill, which he referred to as "The Holy Grail of Flash Collectibles". In essence, Eobard Thawne was a stand-in for fans who kept wanting Barry back and felt that Barry was the "One True Flash".
• During his time writing Jungle Action, Don McGregor was frequently criticized by white readers for not having any white characters in the book. His solution? He had Black Panther fight The Klan.
• The last issue of Marville is one big diatribe against the readers, saying that nobody read Marville because they just wanted to read about super-heroes fighting instead of Bill Jemas' long, inconsistent and factually inaccurate ramblings about God and evolution, which will somehow lead to world peace.
• In one issue from Thor (2014), Jane Foster (currently holding the title of Thor) fights the Absorbing Man, who is portrayed as a misogynistic Jerkass and parrots a bunch of the common talking points that Jane's detractors are fond of using in real life.
• Spider-Man:
  • One More Day: Peter encounters an alternate version of himself who is a bespectacled, overweight game developer and talks about how people who buy comics and video games are losers who don't have anything better to do with their lives. The people who make these things, as shown through the alternate Peter himself, are portrayed as the kind of losers who only do it out of a sense of escapism. This character feels very much like a plug from writer/editor Joe Quesada, who's vocal about how he hates comic fans.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (2018): While heading off to battle the Tri-Sentinel, Spider-Man laments pop-culture's stagnating trend towards nostalgia rather than accepting change — throwing shade at those who complained about the Affirmative-Action Legacy changes that had been taking place since Marvel NOW! and led to many of those changes being reversed in Marvel Legacy and Marvel: A Fresh Start.
• There's a fan theory that the Sudden Downer Ending of The Order (2007), in which Ezekiel Stane curb-stomps the entire team just to piss off Tony Stark, is a metafictional Take That! with Stane representing Marvel fans who are only interested in decades-old characters and don't support series starring newly-created characters.
• In an issue of Stray Bullets, Virginia tells Bobby that comic books are for illiterate morons.
• Stunt Dawgs:
  • Skidd and Splat pull this in the comic.
  Skidd: You know what has ten teeth and an I.Q. of 30?
  Splat: The first ten rows of our audience!
  • Fungus does the same in the same comic book when he decides to introduce himself just in case the readers are as ignorant as they look.
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl:
  • The first volume has a scene where Doreen is asked who could possibly hate Squirrel Girl. Her response: "Jerks?"
  • Issue #8 has one for fans who refuse to accept Jane Foster as the new Thor. When Loki is met by both Jane and the original Thor, he says it's nice to see the actual, true Thor instead of some wannabe, and then clarifies that the real deal he's talking about is Jane, not her predecessor.
• Jhonen Vasquez is notorious for this, especially when Fan Dumb is concerned.
• Wanted spends its last few pages mocking the readers for enjoying the book; given its written by Mark Millar, that's not unexpected.
• The 20th issue of WILQ – Superbohater starts with the eponymous superhero addressing the most faithful fans who have been reading the series since its beginning, and going into a rant against them, calling them a bunch of losers and nerds. Finishing his speech, Wilq warns the fans that they will eventually end up cosplaying The Witcher while waiting for another client in a brothel for fantasy fans, located in Mysłowice — the in-universe Eldritch Location.

Fan Works

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans tend to portray Lyra Heartstrings as an overly obsessed fan of humans. Fan art has had her doing everything from playing with human action figures (and thoroughly embarrassing her friend Bon Bon), to wearing pants and (if the artist is willing to go not-safe-for-work) masturbating to human filth. She's essentially a parody of the most overzealous brony in existence, and images of her fulfilling almost every brony stereotype exist. What makes this an odd example is that it's the audience themselves making the insults.
• An odd example from the original release of Calvin and Hobbes: The Movie — the Credits Gag shows the characters watching the movie itself, and The Stinger is a static image saying "DROP DEAD!" They all take offense and start trying to destroy the screen.
• Farla delivered a devastating one at the end of her fanfic Lucki, which was written under a different screen name in order to hide her identity. She effectively wrote an essay in which she enumerates every one of the story's glaring flaws and how the eponymous character has no redeeming features whatsoever, and that all of the reviewers were too incompetent to notice any of it. It ends with her saying that the reason none of the reviewers cared about Lucki's atrocious behavior is because they would have done exactly the same things in her shoes.
• Universe Falls: "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons" features the Mystery Shack crew preparing to watch a cross-over movie between Ducktective and Dogcopter. The fic's author Minijen takes the opportunity to poke fun at the fandom of both shows (and a few overly critical readers of her own crossover), especially with Mabel's remark about people who go on the Internet and "make long whiny posts about how things didn’t turn out the way they wanted to and why the writers are wrong for not doing things their way."
• An in-universe example happens in The Loud House fanfic The Nightmare House. Luan is sick of her audience at a comedy club not reacting to her jokes at all, so she starts heckling them.

Film — Animated

• Ralph Breaks the Internet: The exchange when Rapunzel asks Vanellope "Do people assume all your problems got solved because a big, strong man showed up?" is a jab at critics of the Disney Princess franchise who unfairly accuse the Princesses of being little more than Damsels in Distress.
• The Simpsons Movie: At a showing of an Itchy and Scratchy short, Homer complains "I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on T.V. for free!" Then the camera turns so that he appears to be pointing at the audience as he adds "If you ask me, everyone in this audience is a giant sucker! Especially YOU!"
• Teen Titans Go! To the Movies: Slade's introduction to the TTG universe:
  Star Labs security guard: (weakily) The Justice League will stop you...
  Slade: (menacingly) The Justice League aren't coming. (he walks into the next room, only to stick his head out a second later) Because they're watching a movie, and as considerate moviegoers, I'm sure they would have turned off their mobile devices. (he looks and points toward the audience) Unlike some people.

Film — Live-Action

• Aliens: The boardroom scene takes a potshot at viewers of the first Alien movie who assumed that the Derelict and the Xenomorph were native to the lifeless LV-426, when the boardroom confirm amongst themselves that it's impossible for LV-426 to have any indigenous life, prompting an irritated Ripley to spell out that the Xenomorph and the Derelict clearly did not originate on the planetoid but rather they crashed there after coming from somewhere else; Ripley even hammers it home by snarking at the boardroom, "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?"
• Vincent Canby's review of Andy Warhol's Bad in The New York Times described the film this way:
  "It also presents the audience with a dilemma. If we become outraged and walk out, as one might in the baby-murder scene, it laughs at us: This is, after all, only a filminvoked, so why don't we become outraged at the various real horrors in the world around us? If we don't become outraged, says, the film, we may not be too different from the robots in the movie."
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever took shots at audiences making Killmonger, the antagonist of Black Panther (2018), seem like a better person than he actually was, by showing the disastrous consequences his actions had for Wakanda. When Killmonger's spirit shows up during Shuri's visit to the Ancestral Plane, he shows that he's still as self-serving and vengeful as ever and tries to corrupt her into following in his footsteps.
• In The Cabin in the Woods, the horror movie tropes present are enforced in-universe because the Earth will be destroyed by at least one rampaging Eldritch Abomination if they don't happen. The audience is that abomination.
• The horror satire/social commentary film Funny Games is intended as a Take That! at the concept of viewers enjoying watching fictional characters suffer and die for their own amusement. It carries itself as a psych-horror film, but it breaks the fourth wall several times to ensure that the viewer feels guilty for enjoying the film as a horror film. There's even an in-character debate about whether or not fiction and real life are the same thing.
• Game of Death: The main premise of the original version is to prove that styles and patterns are wrong. The guardians appear as obvious stand-ins for the martial arts community of the early 1970s, and are stuck in tradition and inflexibility. This extends to people who believe that Jeet Kune Do is another style or the perfect style of martial arts, when it isn't (it's a philosophy). Jabbar is the only fighter with an unknown, uncategorizable style, and thus represents the highest level of martial arts.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary is made as detestable and unsympathetic as possible, making audiences feel satisfied when Gamora stabs him and he is left to die at his ship explodes. Some time after the film's release in theaters, once enough people had seen it, James Gunn revealed that he survived, saved by Drax and imprisoned on Knowhere, as if deliberately trying to disappoint the fans.
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire includes a scene of one little girl telling Katniss that she wants to volunteer as a tribute, just like her, and Katniss' horrified reaction. It is likely directed to fans who glorify the games and want to be a tribute.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1:
  • The movie doesn't shy away from going deep into the tactics of image manipulation, video virality and propaganda, which can be considered ironic since as a Hollywood movie, it employs these very tactics itself, and the audience is being made aware of how they are manipulated.
  • There's also some level of Reality Subtext since a lot of what Plutarch (in particular) describes as Katniss' appeal to people could also apply to her actress.
  • The propos sure seem to look a lot like the trailers...
• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "A Jay and Silent Bob movie? Who'd pay to see that?" Followed by Holden (Ben Affleck), Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (director Kevin Smith) looking at the audience, as Jay winks and Silent Bob grins comically.
• The Lone Ranger: Churchgoers are either fools or hypocrites. The military are dupes, then willing lackeys of the villains. Capitalists are either cowards or actively evil. Either the entire creative team AND studio behind the enormously successful Pirates franchise threw a Critical Failure on "What is the audience for Westerns in general and the Ranger in particular?" or this was a deliberate slam at those fans (that also failed to please the rest of America)
• Nixon:
  Richard Nixon: [To a portrait of Kennedy:] "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."
• Shock Treatment (the disconnected sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show) parodies the only audience that would ever give it attention — Rocky Horror fans. The TV studio audience shouts in unison at what they're watching, seem hopelessly (and happily) glued to their seats, worship Brad and Janet's every move, and blindly follow the characters, even when they're all led into a mental institution. Subtly, they're also wearing costumes from Rocky Horror.
  • On top of that, cheerleader Francine DEMANDS to be called "Frankie". And only "Frankie".
  • On a fourth-wall-breaking basis, the film also includes quite a few tenuous references for those trying to make a connection between this film and RHPS — to name a few, a fictitious TIME magazine with Rocky lips on the cover, sitting in plain view; dialogue references to "a rocky marriage" and "anticipation" (the latter being said while Frank's now-red throne is visible); the newspaper headline "UFO spotted over Denton"; Riff and Magenta expys discussing 'their old series'; etcetera, etcetera.
• The film seminar scenes in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories are widely believed to be an unflattering representation of Woody's own ardent fans:
  Fan: What was the car in the scene supposed to be symbolic of?
  Woody: It was symbolic of a car.
• In Star Trek: First Contact Barclay acts like a gushing fanboy to Zephram Cochrane while Geordi and especially Riker seem embarrassed by this.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens: In a way, Kylo Ren is one long jab at rabid Darth Vader fanboys. He's an in-universe Loony Fan who thinks Vader was the epitome of Evil Is Cool, down to the point of knowing Vader redeemed himself, but ignoring this because he thinks it makes him less ideal. Of course, unlike real life fanboys, he actually has the power to back it up. Thing is, no one takes him as seriously as they did with Vader, in-universe and out. Those who know his backstory ^note He was raised by both his parents, is incredibly gifted with the Force and likely knew so from a young age and never experienced any tragedy or grew up in an oppressive environment, so even when Snoke convinced him to turn to the Dark Side, he doesn't have much darkness in him beyond petulant issues with his uncle and father. know exactly how unjustified his attitude is, the men under his command fear him, but have seen enough temper tantrums to not have any respect for him, and Kylo Ren himself barely understands Vader and Sith philosophy in general, and begs Vader's half-melted iconic helmet for advice. In short, Kylo Ren is a Nerd in Evil's Helmet who, while powerful, can't understand what made Vader feared in-universe, and what made him admirable to viewers.
• Sucker Punch according to Zack Snyder. The brothel-goers are supposed to represent the male nerds in the audience watching for the fanservice.
• Wanted leaves you with this message as its ending.
  Wesley: What the fuck have you done lately?
  • Also inverted, in that the ending could also serve as a Dare to Be Badass message for viewers.

Literature

• Multatuli did this to his readers, who praised his writing. Multatuli wanted his work to inspire action, not just literary acclaim, causing him to make bitter remarks about despising his public with great fervour.
• The narrator in the Creepypasta The Devil Game is generally snarky towards the reader, starting off by calling anyone willing to summon the Devil - for which the text provides a guide - moronic.
• Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas describes the utopian city of Omelas before revealing the horrible secret behind its prosperity. Throughout the story, it is emphasized that the audience would never believe the story if not for this dark element, and the narrator seems to be berating the audience for being unwilling to accept that Utopia could actually exist without a price.
• 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: The entry for Johnny Guitar says that if that film is not to one's liking, perhaps one is better off only watching documentaries.

Live-Action TV

• 24 is notorious for killing off fan-favorites, one of the most notable examples being David Palmer. Worse than that is in Season 7 when Tony Almeida is brought Back from the Dead only to undergo a Face–Heel Turn to seek revenge on the mastermind behind a conspiracy whose masterminds had seemingly already been established (and killed off) in Season 6. Also, Mandy, the fan-favorite villain, who is very much alive at the end of Season 4 when she last appears, was intended to return in Seasons 7 and 8 but they decided against it both times because "it felt like a sensational move".
• When After Midnight debuted on CBS in early 2024 and replaced The Late Late Show, there were immediately a lot of comments online saying something to the effect of "I wanted a talk show," despite the fact that host Taylor Tomlinson had always intended on hosting a Panel Show (it is, in fact, a revival of @Midnight). So, shortly after the debut, Taylor Tomlinson debuted the "Talk Show Segment," where Taylor will ask inane, pointless questions to the panelists that evening. At worst, it's something else for the comedians to riff off, and at best it's an opportunity for free promo of whatever projects the panelists are working on.
  Taylor: Well, that wraps up the Talk Show Portion; are you animals satisfied?!
• In the finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2, the character Kara, who is in a rather unhealthy relationship with Grant Ward (a villainous character who previously betrayed the team), says she will "always stand with Ward". This is in reference to the #standwithward hashtag coined by fans who believed that Ward had a legitimate enough Freudian Excuse with his abusive childhood to warrant redemption, was just misunderstood, or both. The plotline ends with Ward accidentally shooting Kara when she's in disguise as someone else, and then willingly rejoining HYDRA.
  • Even earlier than that, Season 1 has a scene where Ward tries to defend his affiliation with HYDRA by claiming that they aren't actually Nazis. Skye shuts him down and says in no uncertain terms that HYDRA was founded by the Red Skull, "A big fat Nazi." Through to be fair to Ward, HYDRA's ties to Nazi ideology in the MCU are much more blurred than in contrast to the 616-verse comics. (Season 3 even reveals that HYDRA predates the Nazis by a long shot, though Ward may not have known that.)
  • In general, the show has gone to great lengths to shut down the vocal fanbase that wants Ward to be 'redeemed' and pull a Heel–Face Turn, particular the SkyeWard shippers. In "What They Became", Ward frees Skye after HYDRA capture her; the second he turns his back on her, she shoots him repeatedly. In "The Dirty Half-Dozen", Ward briefly rejoins the team in an "enemy of my enemy" scenario and tries to convince them that he's sorry for what he did and misses the bond they used to have; they react with disgust, Skye declares that she's glad she shot him, and the others loudly wish that she'd shot him in the head. "Chaos Theory" in Season 3 has Ward declaring "I don't need redemption," having taken over as the new HYDRA head. "Closure" brings up Ward's brother Thomas, who had the same Freudian Excuses Grant did but didn't become a psychopath. Finally, in "Maveth" he claims he's let go of his personal demons and is ready to serve a higher purpose, but by that he means he'll be a Visionary Villain instead of being out for himself. And by that time he had pissed off Coulson with one of his earlier Kick the Dog actions, and Coulson kills him the minute he gets the chance.
• Arrow angered fans by killing off Laurel Lance in Season 4. Then The Flash (2014) introduced Black Siren, Laurel's counterpart from Earth-2 who was a metahuman criminal. In Season 5 of Arrow, Siren returned, posing as Laurel first before attacking the team. This naturally led to fans speculating and pushing that Siren be redeemed to join the team as a hero. Instead, Season 6 has shown Siren to be a vicious monster, killing people when she doesn't need to and loving how she's torturing her "father" by having him see the spitting image of his daughter as a criminal. Then she has a Heel–Face Turn after all.
• Played for Drama in the Battlestar Galactica (2003) Season 3 finale. When Gaius Baltar is placed on trial, Lee Adama gets called to the stand to explain exactly why the panel should vote to acquit. He delivers a blistering monologue about how everybody in the Fleet has been willing to forgive the various transgressions committed throughout the series, and how quickly they changed their mind for this one person.
• Boardwalk Empire: Owing to her nature as a Brainless Beauty, Ms. Fanservice and Margaret's rival^note Hilariously, Margaret went on to be just as hated as Lucy herself, Lucy became The Scrappy rather early in the first season, and some particularly mean fans extended the hate to her actress, Paz de la Huerta, claiming that she was as much a mess as her character and just behaving as usual rather than acting. In Season 2, the character was given a tragic arc and finally received a couple of centric episodes. One of them had a scene where she rehearses the real 1921 play "A Dangerous Maid" in front of a mirror, filmed with her talking straight to the camera, and it comes as if she's talking back to the audience:
  "I know what everybody says about me behind my back. That I'm just some flibbertigibbet with cotton wool between the ears. Well, I'm wise to a thing or two. I guess you think I'll fall for any old bean with pomade in his hair and keys to a coupe?"
  • Sadly, the scene's power was undermined when it was leaked that Paz was really difficult on the set, and her character was Put on a Bus.
• Bones: Zack being allied with Gormogon and getting arrested at the end of Season 3, killing Sweets at the beginning of Season 10, and putting Hodgins in a wheelchair in Season 11.
• While encouraging people to read The Great Gatsby, Stephen Colbert jokingly suggested most of the viewers of The Colbert Report are illiterate.
• The Community episode "Paradigms of Human Memory" takes a jab at shippers. In it, Annie uses a series of Flashbacks to try and assert that she and Jeff are in a torrid Will They or Won't They? situation, which mostly consist of completely innocent and innocuous actions on Jeff's part. Once it's over, he even flat out says that Annie is desperately overanalyzing things to find romantic subtext that isn't actually there. It's even more explicit because the video style was inspired by this fan-made video set to the Sara Bareilles song Gravity - which Dan Harmon reportedly paid his own money to use.
• Dear White People: Quite a few exchanges, particularly Sam's rants on her "Dear White People" radio show, can and are most probably meant to directly address certain audience members of the series as well as those who did not bother watching because of the title:
  Sam: Dear white people... wow. Y'all really trying it. I get that being reduced to a race-based generalization is a new and devastating experience for some of you, but here's the difference. My jokes don't incarcerate your youth at alarming rates or make it unsafe for you to walk around your own neighborhoods. But yours do. When you mock or belittle us, you enforce an existing system. Cops everywhere staring down the barrel of a gun at a black man don't see a human being. They see a caricature... a thug... a nigger.
• Doctor Who:
  • Whizzkid, from "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy", was intended as a slap in the face to obsessive Doctor Who fans. He enjoys the Psychic Circus a bit too much to be tolerable, but claims "it's not as good as it used to be" (a common fan gripe at the time), despite not having even SEEN it in the past. As described in the page quote, he meets a nasty end.
  • In "The Runaway Bride", Lance, the alien villain's human dupe, is an obnoxious intellectual and social snob who is given a lengthy speech mocking popular culture, and is willing to see the entire rest of the human race wiped out if it means he gets to see the wonders of the universe. As such, he looks a lot like a venomous caricature of the faction of fans who complained that the Russell T Davies era of the show had too many stories set on contemporary Earth, not enough Space Opera spectacle, and too many mainstream pop culture references.
  • In "The Almost People", a mild shot is taken at the small but loud group of Who fans who dislike Matt Smith for no other reason other than he's not David Tennant. There also is a smaller, similarly annoying group of Who fans who dislike Matt Smith and every Doctor since Tom Baker, for no reason other than they aren't Tom Baker. When a clone of Eleven is having his skull runneth over coping with all of his past regenerations:
    The Doctor: [Tom Baker's voice] Would you like a jelly baby? [screaming] [David Tennant's voice] Hello, I'm the Doctor. [Matt Smith's voice] No! Let it go! We've moved on!
  • "Death in Heaven" has Cosplaying Doctor-fangirl Osgood who, despite being a wholly sympathetic character and fan favourite from her previous appearance in "The Day of the Doctor", gets murdered while wearing the Tenth Doctor's signature shoes and the Eleventh Doctor's bow tie. Combine that with the scene at the climax of the episode when the Twelfth Doctor announces that he's not a good man (referencing the Eleventh Doctor's "good man" arc) and that he's not a Messianic Archetype (like the Tenth Doctor was) but 'an idiot with a screwdriver', and it is a pretty solid urging for fans obsessed with the past two Doctors to move on. (Note, however, that there were actually two Osgoods by that point: the original and her Zygon double. One of them — even the Doctor doesn't know which - appears in the following season, gets to be his temporary companion, and gets a new "sister" at the end.)
• The Season 2 finale of The Fall (2013) features Stella interviewing Paul and delivering a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech that includes slapping down the type of people who find him fascinating; during the line "the people who like to read and watch programmes about people like you", the camera angle briefly cuts so that Gillian Anderson is directly addressing the audience.
• Forever Knight opened its last episode with the suicide of a character with the same name as the president of the show's fan club.
• Done to an extreme extent by Glee. When the makers of Glee wanted to get Brittany and Sam together, they used this. They actually made Brittany say that she couldn't be with him since a whole army of angry lesbians would be coming after them. This was a reference to the Brittana fandom that actually got pretty pissed about this.
• The Grand Tour: The Season 2 episode "Unscripted", leveled at fans who frequently complain about how scripted this so-called unscripted show has become. By having a segment without a basic script to use as an outline, it shows how things go wrong without the rough ideas in place since tracks can't be found or booked in time, the presenters wander aimlessly since routes go unplanned, everyone picks a completely different type of car to test, Clarkson takes ages to come up with hyperbolic analogies about the car's systems, May engages in a build challenge entirely by himself, and so on.
• Halo (2022): One of the biggest complaints about the series is how Joh-117 takes off his helmet in the first episode and is far more emotive than he is in the games. The season finale has him take on his canon characterization (The Faceless Silent Protagonist), but this is framed as a hopefuly temporary Death of Personality due to Cortana overriding his body with his approval.
• Have I Got News for You, especially the earlier series. A tie-in book even claimed the 'typical' HIGNFY fan was a Serial Killer.
• Heroes: Tim Kring's infamous "saps and dipshits" comment, in which he insulted any viewer of the show who used DVR.
• Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger: Everyone questions why a 29 year old like Nobuo Akagi would still be a fan of Super Sentai, a franchise aimed to a younger demographic (read: 10 years olds kids). Ironically, this serie IS geared towards an older audience (read: teens and otakus), to the point of adding a tongue-in-cheek content warning ("Good kids, stay away from this show. Got it?"). All part of the joke, naturally.
• In The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, the live studio are often called dirty hobos who are only attending 'cause they were bribed with food. Host Craig Ferguson also liked pointing out how the audience of his network, CBS, tends to skew older than other networks, which allows him to take all the jabs at old people he wants. That is, when Craig's not messing with his other main demographic — stoners.
• One episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, via a Soapbox Sadie on the witness stand, all but called the audience monsters (she's addressing the court gallery, but it's clear who the message was really intended for). For what, you may ask? Owning computers. Granted, it was an anvil that probably needed to be dropped (relating to the Congo War and how metals used in computers might finance African Terrorists), but how very accusatory it is is mind-blowing.
• As soon as CBS showed promos for a reboot of Magnum, P.I. (2018), fans were outraged that star Jay Hernandez wasn't wearing the same iconic mustache Tom Selleck boasted in the original series. At the start of the second episode, a flashback shows Magnum shaving a long beard and briefly trying out that mustache...and it looks absolutely horrible on Hernandez. He thus shaves it off and shows how only Selleck could have pulled that look off.
• Mimpi Metropolitan: Bambang (who recently got a Relationship Upgrade) takes the time to mock the audience for being single unlike him in episode 49 and 51.
• The Monkees' TV special, "33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee" did this in the "Wind-Up Man" number.
  • I'm a wind up man / Programmed to be entertaining / Turn me on / And I will sing a song about a Wind-up world / Of people watching television / Wind up man / Can you hear me laughing at you?
• Only Connect frequently ends with Victoria making some kind of comment about the sad, nerdy viewers. When she's not commenting on the sad, nerdy contestants or the sad, nerdy people who came up with the incomprehensible elimination method.
• The Fan Dumb and Hate Dumb in Pretty Little Liars was so strong that it compelled the writers to change Emily's endgame from being with her One True Love to being with her One True Pairing. It was lampshaded in the show too:
  Emily: Nobody wanted this.
  Paige:Somebody did, they just didn't ask any of us.
• The Price Is Right: Bob Barker responds to an audience that is loudly booing a contestant for thinking a 1 is the first number of a Lincoln Mark VII.
  Bob: Now, look, don't start throwing things, you might hit me!
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "Backwards", in which time (and dialogue) flows backwards, the manager of the pub in Retsehcnam is actually addressing "the one prat in the country who has bothered to get a hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I'm saying. What a poor sad life he's got!"^note Keep in mind that back then, reversing a recording was really hard.
  • The "Back to Earth" miniseries dumps Lister and company into a universe where Red Dwarf is just a television show, and they're all fictional characters. Naturally, the show's fans are all mentally disturbed. Craig Charles (Lister) has publicly lamented wasting "half (his) adult life at Red Dwarf conventions" in the past.
  • In "Emohawk Polymorph II", Duke of Dork Duane Dibbley is described as "Looking so geeky I don't think he could get into a science fiction convention".
• Of course, there's also William Shatner and his Saturday Night Live skit "Get a Life".
  William Shatner: "I mean, for crying out loud it- it's just a TV Show!"
• Charlie Brooker has a real penchant for this;
  • The videogames episode of Screenwipe concludes:
    Charlie Brooker: Yes, videogames are going through a renaissance, and you should not miss out - like you are now, by choosing to watch TV instead like some kind of medieval throwback farmhand fuck.
  • During the sixth episode of Nathan Barley (a collaboration between Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris), there's a brief shot of a police sign appealing for witnesses to a crime to step forward. The small text at the bottom of the sign◊ insults the viewer for being sad enough to pause the DVD to check if the shot contains a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
  • Newswipe: On the fourth episode of the first series, Charlie Brooker talks about the G20 summit and a long list of the economies part of the G20 scroll down the screen. However, one of the entries is:
    "Bottom Land. No, not really. We made that one up. And you bothered to pause this to read the phrase "Bottom Land". What a dismal little prick you are."
  • A Touch of Cloth has many, many background gags, very nearly delivering the viewer an exquisitely handwritten invitation to repeatedly pause and enjoy them all. At least two of them tell the viewer to stop doing that - A hospital boasts a "Pause Button OCD Ward" and a poster admonishes you to "Keep Watching and Stop Pausing".
• The 2014 Sesame Street episode "Me Am What Me Am" is a direct Take That! to the large number of former fans deriding Cookie Monster's now-healthier eating habits by calling him "Veggie Monster". In the episode, a very persistent news reporter gets everybody in-universe to start calling him that as well, and he gets very insecure about his identity because of it.
• Freeform took an almost hilariously mean-spirited and vicious swipe at fans of Shadowhunters in December 2018, after those fans responded to its cancellation with an aggressive tweet/write-in campaign. During an airing of Toy Story, the channel paired several scenes from the movie with humorous graphics and captions that popped up onscreen throughout the airing. One of these was "Will Freeform save Shadowhunters if I keep tweeting about it?", which appeared on the screen during the scene where Woody consults the magic 8-ball for advice, and receives the response "Don't count on it."
• Season 3 of Stranger Things takes a shot at people who stay inside all day on the Fourth of July...like, for example, the hundreds of fans binging the show when it came out on said July 4th.
• Supernatural has this in spades as it likes regularly Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
  • In one episode, Sam and Dean end up attending a Supernatural convention, encountering various hypercritical and overly obsessed fans.
  • In fact, the show portrays any adult guy who is interested in horror fiction or other geeky hobbies as a pathetic loser who can't get laid. The most positive depiction as of the end of Season 4 was a couple of not-conventionally-attractive, working-class guys, who were in a happy relationship with each other.^note These two, in particular, were even named after real people on the Television Without Pity website, and considering the show's writers' longstanding habit of using insinuations of male homosexuality as an insulting joke, the depiction might not even have been meant to be read as positive. But every straight fan or even regular characters who admit to knowing geeky stuff get some line accusing them of being socially incompetent nerds. (Note this is usually from Dean, and comes off as a bit hypocritical on his part once we see him majorly geek out over horror movies and Scooby-Doo, understand Kurt Vonnegut references, and really enjoy LARPing.)
  • There's also this gem against the Incest Shipping Yaoi Fangirls.
    Dean: What’s a slash fan?
    Sam: As in Sam slash Dean... Together.
    Dean: Like... together together?
    Sam: Yeah.
    Dean:...They do know we’re brothers, right?
    Sam: Doesn’t seem to matter.
    Dean: Aw, come on. That's... that’s just sick.
  • This kind of fan is also depicted in the recurring character of Becky, who may have been meant as an affectionate parody, but mostly just comes across as creepy and insulting, because she keeps on sexually harassing Sam. She even uses magic to get Sam to marry her in one episode.
  • In a Season 4 Episode, titled "Jump the Shark", Sam and Dean meet their long lost younger half-brother Adam at a diner called Cousin Oliver's. Since the fandom was notoriously fickle about new characters adding a younger Winchester brother seemed like a suicidal move by the writers, as the title implied. Adam turns out to be quite likable and sympathetic, but is revealed to be a ghoul impersonating the real Adam, who was Dead All Along. Sam and Dean grieve the brother they never knew at the end.
• Taskmaster has an ongoing Running Gag where Greg Davies, the titular Taskmaster, gets increasingly irritated at certain sections of the audience, specifically those who like to go online and challenge / nitpick his decision-making throughout the show. It eventually leads to an episode in Series 12 where he opens the episode with a lengthy rant that anyone who dares question his judgments had best ensure that they are using an excellent VPN service to comment about it online, or else he'll track them down and attack them by dropping down from trees near where they live while dressed as a crow.
• In Season 2, Episode 6 of Trailer Park Boys, the boys find a note from Jacob that appears onscreen for a matter of seconds. At the bottom of the note is a line that reads "If you are freeze-framing this on DVD your (sic) fucked."
• Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas famously vowed to kill off Sheriff Lamb if fans kept demanding he be made nicer and shown shirtless more often. Fans kept it up, sure he was joking, so Thomas followed through—brutally.
• Vicious: A series that stars nerd icons Sir Ian McKellen^note Magneto, Gandalf, etc. and Sir Derek Jacobi^note The Master, etc.:
  Violet: Will there be a lot of single men?
  Freddie: It's a science fiction "fan club" event; they'll be single, but they'll be disgusting.
• Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV: A speciality of Susie Blake's continuity announcer, including such gems as "We'd like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them."
• The West Wing had a few episodes in the middle of Season 3 that were a little story of Aaron Sorkin's misadventures on the Television Without Pity forums.
  • A temp in the communications office who is offended by Sam's sexually-charged comment about Ainsley is browbeaten for being a Straw Feminist taking attention away from "real" sexual harrassment (in response to criticism of the show's portrayal of women and the frequent sexualized banter and comments towards the female characters that would be inappropriate in a real workplace).
  • Toby comes out on top in an argument about whether or not to use the phrase "Islamist extremism" in response to criticism of "Isaac and Ishmael" (which was the show's Very Special Episode about 9/11).
  • Josh finds a fan forum dedicated to himself, starts participating, and is driven off the site. CJ later describes the members of such fora as asylum inmates and the moderators as Nurse Ratched.
  • Finally, the US Poet Laureate tells Toby (but also the audience) that artists' only responsibility is to entertain you for however long they're trying to entertain you, and any truth they portray along the way is through luck.
• The Wiz Live! had an exchange following The Reveal of the Wiz as an ordinary woman in disguise interpreted as the script calling out whatever viewers would object to director Kenny Leon casting Queen Latifah as the usually-male Wiz.
  Dorothy: (to her shocked companions) And what's wrong with bein' a woman?
  Tin Man: Uh, nothin'...
  Dorothy: That's right! Nothin' wrong with bein' a woman. I don't know where y'all fools learned y'all manners.
• Played for Laughs in The Witcher (2019) when Jaskier manages to charm his way onto a boat for free because a dock worker is a fan of his songs... until said dock worker begins to criticize aspects of them which are clearly fan complaints about season one like how it was confusing that the show jumps around multiple time periods with little warning and that "he saw the reveal with the dragon coming a mile away". Jaskier snaps at him, hurls some insults, and hits him with a good old fashioned Let's See YOU Do Better!, and said dock worker rebukes by calling Jaskier a belligerent arsehole who can't handle a little criticism from a devoted fan who loves almost all aspects of his work.
• From Wizards of Waverly Place: In the finale, Alex says she put peanut butter on the outside of a sandwich because "that's what a 40-year old gets for ordering off the kid's menu."

Magazines

• When MAD isn't engaging in Self-Deprecation, they go for this. One of the most infamous covers is of a hand giving the audience the finger. They often insinuate that anyone who reads their magazine is an imbecile.

Music

• Andrew Jackson Jihad combines this with Self-Deprecation in "We Didn't Come Here to Rock", accusing their listeners of being more interested in bashing art than actually enjoying it. It's a common feature at their live shows.
• "Admit It" by Anything is six and-a-half glorious minutes of frontman Max Bemis blatantly saying how much he hates hipsters.
  Prototypical non-conformist
  You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift store Gestapo
  You adhere to a set of standards and tastes
  That appear to be determined by an unseen panel of hipster judges (BULLSHIT!)
• Inverted with "Look At Me (I'm A Winner!)" by The Aquabats!, which seems to be a song about how awesome the listener is.
• Blues Traveler famously does this with their single "Hook." The very first line is "It doesn't matter what I say/As long as I sing with inflection," and goes on to argue that lead singer John Popper could sing anything he wants—as long as it's catchy and sounds vaguely poetic, people will listen in droves and talk about how "deep" the lyrics are. Popper proves just that when he begins rambling nonsensical rhymes ("If you're Rin Tin Tin or Anne Boleyn") and outright telling off listeners for falling for the trick ("the hook brings you back"). Humorously, the song ended up being a megahit, suggesting that the audience didn't catch any of the satire.
• The Dead Kennedys weren't very happy with how they were becoming popular with neo-Nazi punks misinterpreting their songs, so eventually they wrote a track just for them, entitled "Nazi Punks Fuck Off".
• The Fall's "How I Wrote Elastic Man", about a singer who complains that whatever he does, everything everyone ever wants to know is how he wrote that one song... and they don't even get the title right.
  And they will ask me
  How I wrote "Plastic Man"
  How I wrote "Plastic Man"
• "Three Little Pigs", by Green Jelly concludes with the following:
  And the moral of the story is
  That bands with no talent
  Can easily amuse idiots
  With a stupid puppet show.
• Mindless Self Indulgence frequently takes jabs at their audience, both through their lyrics and hurling between songs during their live shows.
  • Their third album has a song called 'You'll Rebel To Anything (As Long as It's Not Challenging)' which seems to be dedicated to insulting their fans. As the chorus says:
  You're telling me that fifty million screaming fans are never wrong,
  I'm telling you that fifty million screaming fans are fucking morons
  • The same album has another song titled "Stupid MF." It pokes fun at the audience for being unable to understand Jimmy Urine's fast-paced singing.
    "Is it simple enough for you? Can everybody understand me? You all still following me?"
    "Should I talk slower like you're a retard?"
  • The live segment at the beginning of "Backmask," where Jimmy talks to the audience:
    Jimmy: You guys, man, you gotta get organized. Come on! When I say we, you say suck! We!
    Audience: Suck!
    Jimmy: We!
    Audience: Suck!
    Jimmy: Dick!
• Inverted in Molly And The Tinker's "The Anti-Singalong Song", in which the performers get the audience to sing about how they won't sing along, because the singers are just being lazy and not doing their jobs.
• Nanowar of Steel: "Metal Boomer Battallion" is a rip-roaring War Is Glorious song that satirizes elitism in Heavy Metal fandom: the protagonists hate any song after 1982 (except Metallica, which was somehow better in 1922) and pull the No True Scotsman fallacy in online flame wars.
• Negative XP has "Kyle", which describes an individual who doesn't have a job, does drugs, hates his family, and is way too into first-person shooters. In the second verse, it's said that Kyle "listens to Negative XP", suggesting that if you listen to this song, This Loser Is You.
• The Nirvana song "In Bloom" is squarely - or at least as squarely as anything the typically cryptic and abstract Cobain ever wrote - aimed at that sections of Nirvana's audience who just liked the tunes and didn't much care for or were even aware of the underlying message. In the unused liner notes for In Utero, Cobain was brutally direct:
  If any of you hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records!
• The Diss Track that Quackity wrote before MCC15 contains entire verses that "insult" 22 of the 40 competitors (including Quackity himself)... and one line which notably calls out the Twitter side of the MCYT fandom.
  There are 10 teams, 40 people
  And we're gonna have some fun
  Oh my God, all Twitter's fighting
  Because they've never seen the sun before
• From the live concert on the deluxe version of Sabaton's Heroes album: "For those of you who don't speak Swedish, welcome to the Sabaton Cruise. And if you want to know what I'm saying, you better fucking learn Swedish!" Also, him telling the Polish members of the audience that "you gotta make your city names easier".
• Showbread's song "Shepherd, No Sheep" from their 2009 album "The Fear Of God" is a whole song consisting of this trope coupled with Misaimed Fandom and Artist Disillusionment, talking to their old fans who latched onto their first album "No Sir, Nihilism Is Not Practical" because it was a high-energy, distorted rock album with screamed vocals released at a time when Screamo and Metalcore were steadily gaining popularity.
• tool: "Hooker with a Penis" has a few, combined with self-admitted The Man Is Sticking It to the Man:
  All you know about me is what I've sold you, dumbfuck
  I sold out long before you ever even heard my name
  I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit
  Then you bought one.
• Vektroid's "Sick & Panic" is a 12 minute compilation of random, glitchy, discordant noises that barely sounds like music. If you make it to the halfway point, you'll hear the words "rise", "go", "get out", and "get outside, bitch", seemingly telling you that you need a life if you've been listening to it for this long.
• Frank Zappa: "This here song might offend you some. If it does it's because you're dumb.

Pinball

• In Aerosmith, Jacky provides a few quips mocking the player.
  "EXTRA BALL! You'll need it..."
• One-Eye the talking skull from Bone Busters has these among his repertoire.
  One-Eye: "You're a bonehead!"
• Centaur will sometimes taunt, "Slow, aren't you?"
• Many of the Ringmasters' quotes in Cirqus Voltaire are insults like this.
  Ringmaster: "You're a disaster and I'm still the Ringmaster!"
• Congo has Amy the gorilla insult the player after a tilt:
  "Player one ugly."
• Deadpool: Deadpool doesn't take too kindly to players who risk tilting:

  "Quit shakin' the machine!"

  "Yeah, keep shakin' the game. There's candy inside... stupid!"

  [on tilting] "So how's that death save working out for ya?"

  • One of the joke Mystery awards is "Can't you just be happy with what you have?"
  • Also inverted; if the player is doing really well, Deadpool knows:
    "Hey, everyone! Look at how awesome this player is."
• Family Guy has lots of ways to insult the player.
  Peter: "Only a jackass would leave Happy Hour early."
• Done occasionally in Indianapolis 500:
  Pit Crew: "Shoot the blinking light, you wanker!"
• The Munsters plays a Laugh Track at the player's expense if they continuously miss shots.
• No Fear: Dangerous Sports: Losing the ball too quickly results in Skull (the announcer) mocking you for it.
  Skull: "Play better!"
• Done repeatedly and incessantly in No Good Gofers, as the game is all about Buzz and Bud trying to ruin the player's day.
  Bud: "You hit your own cart!"
  Buzz: "You're dumber than Bud!"
• Red & Ted's Road Show:
  • Finishing multiball without getting a single jackpot prompts Red to shout, "You missed EVERYTHING!"
  • One of Red's quotes when starting a new game is "Jerk alert!"
• A good chunk of the custom voice work in Rick and Morty consists of Justin Roiland finding various ways to insult the player, be it Rick overtly criticizing them or Morty providing backhanded compliments:
  "Geez, that was one heck of a game, you know? Y-you just lost some money."
• A behind the scenes video for Rush (2022) shows Ed Robertson mentioning that he (and many other top pinball players) enjoy tables that taunt them. To that end, several voiceover lines in the game throw shade at the player's performance.
  Geddy Lee: I can play three keyboards and a bass, and you can't even hit the ball?
• Tilting The Shadow causes the game to comment:
  Khan: "You still think you can control the game with brute force?"
• There's a decent amount of this in The Simpsons (Data East).
  Grampa Simpson: Don't you know how to use the flippers?
• If you press START without any credits in Sega Pinball's South Park, the game replies "Come on! Even Kenny's family has a quarter."
• Playing poorly in Spider-Man (Stern) results in various snarktastic remarks from J. Jonah Jameson.
  Jameson: "Play better!"
• Star Trek: The Next Generation has several if the player tilts during a game.
  Worf: "You are without honor."
• In Tee'd Off, this is Gunther's primary schtick.
  Gunther: "Did anybody teach ya how to play this game?"
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Stern) subtly does this during the tilt warning animation (which depicts a gadget of Donatello's malfunctioning). Look closely and you'll find that the error messages that pop up refer to a program called "PlayBetter.exe".
• Tilting WWF Royal Rumble prompts Vince McMahon to yell "That's a cheap shot!"

Professional Wrestling

• Brian Pillman's infamous "smart mark" promo in the ECW Arena is one enormous middle finger to the much more inside ECW fans. He even compared them to the much maligned Eric Bischoff to prove his point.
• During his feud with Tommy Dreamer, Mick Foley lambasted the ECW audience as part of his famous "Cane Dewey" promo, saying that they were All Take and No Give and they made him regret having jumped ship from WCW for a bunch of ingrates.
• On the final WCW Monday Nitro, Vince McMahon took the opportunity to not only bury the company but also all the "Southern rednecks" who watched it.
• This was what WWE did when it buried Daniel Puder and "Kaval" after it let fans vote for who they wanted to win Tough Enough and NXT, respectively, and the two of them won by landslides, instead giving near endless screen time to inferior runner ups The Miz and Michael McGillicutty. The Miz would even do interviews talking about proving wrong the people who said he didn't belong in pro wrestling because he didn't do MMA, a direct reference to Puder, who was so popular because of his UFC background, something WWE later embraced with Brock Lesnar. Meanwhile The Scrappy commentator Michael Cole openly mocked "the internet nerds who voted for Kaval." while otherwise endlessly shilling internet social media programs shitter and tout. While Daniel Puder reportedly had issues that led to his release, giving WWE a (petty) reason to aggravate potential customers who wanted to see him, Kurt Angle had broken three of Chris Nawrocki's ribs before Puder "shot" on him so it wasn't as if attitude problems were exclusive to Puder. Kaval, though, was reportedly on his best behavior, but told there was nothing for him and made to do the job till he asked for a release^note and that's a half truth, as Kaval had asked for his release before NXT but was kept around till they decided to fire him.. Kaval would get the last laugh as he then put on better matches than anything WWE recorded all year in New Japan with Prince Devitt, whom WWE then hired. Kaval's insulted fans? Not so much.
• Would be WWE rival TNA is not above mocking its fan base or reducing the time of wrestlers the large majority of its base tells them it wants to see. While it has listened to the roars of "Austin Aries" and mostly treated him well since he was voted into the promotion, when Desmond Wolfe was voted by fans to be most deserving of a World Title shot, TNA not only had him lose that title shot, but proceeded to bury Wolfe for the rest of his run, sometimes having him lose multiple times in a single night. Eventually, Wolfe would look for ways out of his contract and return to Ring of Honor (where he got screwed by the Sinclair suits, but that's another topic). Though TNA would be Vindicated by History on the Wolfe case, as it later turned out that his health issues were writing the plot for a lot of this.
• After Glory By Honor VII: The Final Countdown, the RoHbots started chanting "Twinkies" during Austin Aries's matches till at Super Card Of Honor later that year, he brought a bag of "Golden Snack Cakes" as a peace offering to Delirious, so the fans started chanting "Golden Snack Cakes" instead, leading Aries to call them puppets.
• The TNA fans in the Impact Zone were told they had a "Role to play." which was apparently not boo Hulk Hogan, as they had done for a few weeks, including the one prior when he made his big debut. Not boo Hogan and not demand for the return of the six sided ring. Ring Of Honor would turn this one into a Take That! to TNA at its 2010 Gold Rush pay per view, when after the dark matches the RoHbots too were told they had a role to play, which was to chant ROH when the camera comes on, which they did at every taping anyway until Yes chants became all the rage.
• TNA rejecting The Big O after he placed in the top five among fan votes regarding their "Gut Check Challenge" was also this trope in action.
• In the quote/unquote "Reality Era", both WWE and TNA on-screen authority figures have seemed to have gotten very good at mocking fans who support Smart Mark internet favorites, either by teasing success for said favorites only to snatch it away in lieu of more conventional choices for the main event scene, or by straight up getting on the mike and comparing such fans to spoiled crybabies that whine when they don't get what they want.
• In a much less mean spirited, more comical take on this trope, Ethan Carter III, in response to the fans in New York chanting "ECW" despite aunt Dixie's insistence that they would get TNA sued, put together a team called ECW consisting of ECW's final champion Rhyno, the final WWECW Champion Rycklon Stevens (who became Ezekiel Jackson when WWE hired him) and Gene Snitsky (who had little to nothing to do with ECW).
• Allysin Kay's Heel–Face Turn in SHINE Wrestling began with her acknowleding the fans that supported her all the way to her second shot at the singles title belt as loud mouthed gang of losers who were every bad thing she wasn't. Unsurpringly, Kay turned out to be "baby face" of the nominal variety, and after she became champion lost the belt shamelessly reverted to her previous ways to get back and stay on top.
• There is a growing sentiment among Smart Mark WWE fans that this is the legitimate mindset of Vince McMahon, arguing that he's ignoring entire roster in his desperate attempts to get Roman Reigns over the way the he wants him to. Thanks to the destruction of kayfabe back in the late 90s, even the average casual fan has a vague grasp of how things are booked in the company, leading to a lot of X-Pac Heat against Reigns, even though Reigns can't control how he's booked. If that is true, then it eventually took Reigns himself finally putting his foot down for his late 2020 return and insisting he come back as a heel to finally amend the problem.
• Roman Reigns' new T-shirt is a not-so-subtle shot to the complaints over him defeating Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 39.

Radio

• Part of the (very thorough) Self Deprecating Humour of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
• A staple part of the humour in The Now Show is making fun of BBC Radio 4 listeners.
• The Ricky Gervais Show: Almost every episode contains some form of insult to the listeners, usually berating how few listeners there are and that the minority listening should just turn over or switch it off.
• An episode of The News Quiz in which they discussed accusations that the Radio 4 audience was too middle class.
• And in the U.S., the NPR news quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me regularly enjoys making fun of its listeners as the sort who were beaten up and stuffed in their lockers at school, studying in the library while everyone else was partying and playing beer pong, etc.

Tabletop Games

• Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed by "Designer X" (Greg Costikyan in a very bad mood) is this in spades. It's available under the Creative Commons license now; download the PDF here if you're so disposed.
  You puerile adolescent- and post-adolescent scum don't give a tinker’s cuss. ...there's no point in trying to write a good set of rules because you idiots can't tell the difference between a good set and a bad set anyway.

Theatre

• Aristophanes's plays were written to be performed only once, in front of an audience he knew personally, so he did this a lot, (making this trope Older Than Feudalism):
  • The Clouds: During an argument between the personified Stronger Argument and Weaker Argument, Weaker tells Stronger to look out at the audience and tell her what he sees. Following her advice, he exclaims "By the gods, they're all corrupt!" (Various translations render this anything from "faggots" and "assholes" to "blackguards" but the meaning is pretty clear from his very next exclamation that "Every one of them is one of those spreaders of their butt cheeks!")
  • The Frogs: "Wait, if we're in Hell, shouldn't there be a lot of sinners around?" "Sure, check out the audience."
• Avenue Q has a moment in the song "The Internet Is for Porn" where Kate Monster insists that normal people don't sit around at home watching porn, leading Trekkie Monster to lead her gaze to the audience members to single out certain people who might not have the best search histories.
• Elisabeth: In "Kitsch", Lucheni the narrator mocks the audience for expecting a pretty fairy tale about the lovely empress and her handsome husband. Audiences of the original production went in expecting exactly that. Including the original actor for Death, Uwe Kröger, who had hoped to be cast as Emperor Franz-Josef.
• In Hamlet (written of course by the English William Shakespeare and performed for English audiences, but set in Denmark), the graveyard scene has this exchange:
  Hamlet: Ay, marry, why was [Hamlet] sent into England?
  First Gravedigger: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, it's no great matter there.
  Hamlet: Why?
  First Clown: 'Twill, a not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he.

• Some versions of "Master of the House" in Les Misérables contain these lines in reference to the numerous alcoholics and other generally-not-well-off patrons of Thenardier's inn:

  Thenardier: Homing pigeons, homing in

  They fall through my doors

  And their money's good as yours!

• Near the start of Lucky Guy, Courtney Vance's character Hap Harrison says the time period is from 1985 to 1998. “(New York) City had become polarized between rich and poor." Harrison indicated the people in the front row as "rich" and the people sitting the balcony as "poor." In some performances, the audience responds "harshly" to this, briefly taking Harrison aback.
• The "Pyramus and Thisbe" sequence in A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring a pair of doomed lovers killing themselves because they couldn't be together, was almost certainly a Take That! aimed squarely at fans of Romeo and Juliet who failed to grasp that the romance therein was not supposed to be taken as a great love.

Toys

• A more affectionate example than many of the other examples here is when, in BIONICLE, Vezon complains about Trinuma not answering "any of his hundred ten questions. Or the follow-ups," a Leaning on the Fourth Wall nod to the vast amount of questions that the author gets about the story, some of which inevitably go unanswered.

Video Games

• Back in 1995 presents itself as a Genre Throwback to classic Survival Horror titles from the 90's like oldschool Resident Evil and Silent Hill, complete with the gameplay conventions they helped to codify. However, the game's main "twist" makes it abundantly clear what the developers think of gamers who enjoy the formula embodied by such games. Namely, that they're out-of-touch, behind the times, and overly nostalgic to a delusional degree. This incredibly petulant reveal makes one question who the hell the game was even made for, as those who agree with the developers' assessment will obviously not care to play a game with fixed camera angles and Tank Controls, while those who do enjoy said classics aren't likely to be very amused by a game built entirely around insulting both them and their interests.
• If you exit a room in Berzerk before you've killed every robot in it: "Chicken! Fight like a robot!"
• The Binding of Isaac replaces the doodle on the title screen with an obese Isaac labeled "STOP PLAYING!" once you get Golden God. This little jab at the player was taken out from the Rebirth remake, but returns in the Repentance DLC, this time for getting 100% completion on all three save files.
• In Blaze Union, one battlefield depicts a gaggle of delinquents first trying to score with the female party members, then actually attacking and trying to rape them when that fails. Said delinquents are given the same kind of musical cues and attention that the player characters do—and they're portrayed as laughably ineffectual scum of the earth that will most likely die virgins even if their attacks on women don't get them killed. This appears to be a stab at a Vocal Minority of rape fantasy loving otaku in the Japanese fandom, Unfortunately, no attention was paid to the women who enjoy such hentai.
• When losing Bokosuka Wars:
  WOW! YOU LOSE!
• Carnivores:
  • Shooting any ambient animal will gain no points whatsoever, which is a warning not to waste ammo.
  • The Brachiosaurus doesn't even die if you shoot it with any weapon, which is another way how players waste ammo.
  • The T-Rex, being immune to bullets, will soon begin chasing you if you dare attract its attention, as this is punishment for not shooting it in the eye immediately.
• Not far into Cinders, an adaptation of Cinderella, the protagonist reads a thinly veiled Expy of Cinderella and sermonizes on how it's misogynist for having a Damsel in Distress character. (Not that this stopped the creators from advertising their game as "a mature take on a classic fairytale".)
  Game blurb: Distancing itself from the judgmental simplicity of [Cinderella], Cinders tries to explore the more complex nature of oppression, responsibility and innocence.
• The Closer: Game of the Year Edition has a Chain of Deals sidequest where you exchange soda brands with various NPCs because they didn't like or couldn't stomach the soda they had. So when you get to the last person on the chain, they just call the player out for expecting something in return, as would be the case in other video games.
  NPC: Thanks! You must have grabbed the last [Coca-Cola]!
  Closer: Don't I get something in return?
  NPC: No, why would you?
  Kami: Well, I suppose that's the last soda we'll trade...
  Achievement Unlocked: 25G — Completed a Meaningless Side Quest
• CTGP-7 has Chain Chomp, who barks back at the player when he loses.
• A particularly vicious and controversial one forms the big reveal in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. It's revealed that the characters are in fact participants on a Danganronpa-themed TV show, which is being broadcast to the entire world, and is in fact on its ''fifty-third season'' (this being where the "V3" in the title come from; the "V" is a Roman numeral 5^note Technically, it should be Danganronpa LIII, but that would spoil it out-of-universe); the show is immensely popular, with people around the world trying to guess who will be murdered and who the mastermind is, and all the students volunteered to have false memories implanted in order to participate. The game goes to great lengths to call out people who constantly demand more Danganronpa games (or else create their own stories) for the same reasons as the audience in the game: to find out what happens each time. To say the fanbase's opinion is split on this particular twist would be an understatement, although some who defend the ending argue that it wasn't meant to be seen that way.
• Get a game over in the 3DO adaptation of Demolition Man, and Sylvester Stallone will appear and personally tell you how much you suck. Then an audience of children will laugh at you.
• Devil Engine:
  • One of the continue screen "hints" informs you that "milking bosses for score is lame."^note The game does freeze point accumulation for destroying enemies during bosses, although you can milk boss bullets with repeated Bursts.
  • Another hint tells you not to play the game in tate^note Shmup lingo for a monitor turned vertically, derived from the Japanese term 立てる (tateru, "to stand up"); a lot of shmups use a vertically-oriented monitor. To English speakers, it's more evocative of the word "rotate", but that's not where the term comes from. because it will "look weird", mainly a jab at players who play shmups in the wrong screen orientation just because they feel like it.
• DmC: Devil May Cry has a particular scene which pokes fun at the HUGE backlash that occurred among the franchise's old-time fans after trailers unveiled Dante's re-design. While fighting a giant demon at a fair, an attack destroys a building and leaves Dante wearing a long-haired white wig and a smashed mirror in front of him. He looks at himself, smirks, says "not in a million years", and then tears the wig off and goes back to fighting. Some fans saw this as a light-hearted joke, and others, especially the old-timers, saw it as a further middle-finger directed at them. However, this whole scene ends up being a case of Hypocritical Humor at the end of the game, as his hair turns permanently white as a side-effect of the Devil Trigger. Also later DLC allowed you to play as classic Dante. And then Capcom would Un Reboot the franchise with Devil May Cry 5.
• When the first trailers and screenshots of Diablo III were released, there was a lot of backdraft over the game not being "dark enough", to the point everyone thought the game was going to be a Lighter and Softer cash-in. Blizzard's response? Whimsyshire, the game's new cow level, which has you fighting your way through a candy-colored landscape of rainbows, smiling clouds, dancing flowers, and unicorns.
• Distorted Travesty, your Mission Control best friend Jeremy mocks you for dying every single time it happens. And the game is actually pretty tough, so you will probably die quite a lot. Playing on Easy Mode only increases the insults. The sequel has a different Mission Control character who encourages you upon death instead, but the third game brings Jeremy back and with him, his insults.
• Cranky Kong in the Donkey Kong Country series does this all the time. His end quote in the Donkey Kong 64 manual boils down to 'buy the strategy guide or just get better at the game', and his comments in the games themselves are along the lines of 'stop dying and you won't have to buy all these expensive items'. Like "Crash into too many things, and even this stuff won't save you." Or "Why are you falling into holes, anyway?" And that's not even getting into what he said when he took over Nintendo of America's Twitter account... "Old enough to remember when falling in a pit in a platformer was called 'lack of skill' and not 'cheap.'"
• In Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, the code to start a new file with 50 lives is Y, A, Select, A, Down, Left, A, Down (YA SAD LAD).
• The Playstation and Saturn ports of Doom tell you that you can go back to your "life of frivolity" when you beat the final level.
• The Elder Scrolls series has M'aiq the Liar, a recurring Easter Egg Legacy Character who has appeared in every game since Morrowind. 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 taking some at Bethesda itself. Many of his comments are snarky Straw Fan-like comments regarding features that fans have wanted in the series, elements from past games that were removed from later games, or is commenting on features Bethesda finally delivered after years of fan demand.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 2: Get a Game Over in the first area, and the Protip given will insult you:
  "You got slaughtered by kittens? You suck!"
• Paradox Interactive's DLC prices are not free of criticism, which they are well aware of. In Europa Universalis an extremely rare event can occur, where peasants ask for more fancy 'buns', with better toppings and taste, for the same price of regular 'buns'. The possible reactions are:
  Give them buns! (lose prestige)
  Buns for all! (lose paper mana)
  No bun for you! (lose bird mana)
  My preciousss bunss! (lose sword mana)
• In Fairy Godmother Tycoon, the ending scene has the Godmother talking to you about her retirement plans, and she asks if you're familiar with playing games downloaded onto a computer. The player's avatar replies that it sounds like a waste of time.
• Fallout 4 has a slightly more nuanced example than usual in the form of The Institute, the Big Bad of the game. The Institute serves in part as a pretty unsubtle middle finger by Bethesda Game Studios towards the residents of Western nations (who make up the majority of their own audience) in how they implicitly accept the abuse of developing nations by their own countries in return for pampered lives and (relative) comfort.
• In Final Fantasy VII, if you fail four or more times on the chocobo race to escape the Corel Prison, Ester will complain that Cloud must be kidding her, that it was the best chocobo that she had available, and suggest that the player just put the race on auto mode to have the computer take care of it for them.
  • On a much grander scale, the Arbiters of Fate in Final Fantasy VII Remake are practically a supernatural Railroading conspiracy that tries to force the remake to follow the plotline of the original game, to the point of violently intervening on numerous occasions. So, of course, the game ends with the Arbiters defeated and the plot going Off the Rails, with the fanbase predictably splintering as a result.
• Final Fantasy XIV has one scene that shows a band of adventurers disbanding over a healer who not only sucked at her job, but she sucked so bad that her fiance died in the dungeon they were exploring. The spat between the adventurers is a jab at players who constantly argue and point fingers at each other whenever something goes wrong. There's also NPC who will ask for your name and will say that there's a special place in hell for you if you use an "amusing" alias.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Do really badly in The Blazing Blade and the ending will note about the player "To this day, historians look back and question how these incomprehensible strategies ever led to victory."
  • If the player loses enough units in Shadow Dragon to be unable to meet the maximum number of units deployable for a chapter, they will receive filler units named after numbers. Lose them, and (in the American English translation) you receive more... with names like Owend, Lucer, and Auffle (Owned, Loser, and Awful).
• The FreeSpace 2 level editor will call you a moron if you try to confuse its ship naming system.
• In Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, one of Foddy's quips is that people who choose to watch Let's Play videos of the game instead of playing it are like "baby birds eating regurgitated food".
• In GoldenEye Source extended camping will "earn" a player the Octopussy achievement. The Quantum of Solace game did the same thing for players who finished the game on the easy difficulty.
• In GTA 3, try to walk into the spot that starts the car race. You get a message that this is supposed to be a car race (duh). And that you are an idiot.
• Grand Theft Auto IV and V have many on their custom radio stations, calling the player lonely, selfish, and a pirate with terrible taste in music.
  "Thank God you didn't pay for that record! It's awful!"
  "Imagine a warm musical cocoon you can crawl into and ignore everyone else".
• Guild Wars has a few gentle jabs at players in the April Fool's Day quest "Annihilator 2: Searing Day".
  • In one case the player is chided for wanting to stay in pre-Searing Ascalon rather than returning to the future; many players requested the option to travel back to pre-Searing while other created characters who remain in the pre-Searing version permanently.
  • One of the random comments from a past version of the player is that they think they'd make a great sixth god which is rather amusing coming from a barely-trained cadet. Many players had complained that Kormir hadn't deserved replacing Abaddon as the sixth god due to her constant mistakes throughout Nightfall.
• Guild Wars 2 had many players complain that for all their work in creating the Pact they felt insulted that Trahearne became the Marshal and overall leader while the player was only the Commander. After Trahearne's death the Pact leardeship concludes they made a mistake in letting the Marshal lead their forces in person. As such when the player is offered the role of Marshal it's with the stipulation that they'll be on permanent desk duty far from the front lines. Needless to say, the player refuses.
• There is a point in GUN where you have to break out of a jail cell by grabbing the jailor as he drunkenly stumbles into your reach. If you miss the first time, he does the same maneuver again, with different dialogue. Miss three times in a row, however, and the only new dialogue you get is "You are the dumbest sumbitch I ever seen", which is obviously aimed at the player.
• In Hate Plus, if the player's assistant is *Hyun-ae, they have to make a cake for her. Not an in-game cake; *Hyun-ae tasks you with making an actual cake in real life to enjoy with her. If you try to refuse, or if you agree to it and don't wait out the time typically needed to make a cake, she'll chew you out for only treating her as a series of Event Flags and accuse you of only playing Dating Sims for the sexual content.
• Hidden Expedition: Everest does this lightly on the opening screen by describing one of the competing teams as made up of people who think they can climb Everest because "they've done it hundreds of times in video games!"
• Injustice 2 sees the Red Hood quip after an opponet's first health bar empties is "Let's take a vote," a reference to the infamous poll dictating Jason's fate in A Death in the Family.
• I Wanna Be the Guy: The infamous sword.
  "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this."
  "YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD, YOU RETARD!"
• Hanako's route from Katawa Shoujo is one directed at fans of Moe anime girls that see them as someone that needs to be protected. On the surface, she seems like a straight-forward example of the type of girl such fans would want to protect. She's a Shrinking Violet who is incredibly timid due in part to the burn scars on her face. She also has a tragic past, as she lost her parents in a fire when she was a child. Except it's also revealed that she feels patronized when people see her as some tragic heroine that needs protecting. If Hisao tries to be a white knight and make a Declaration of Protection, Hanako will snap at him for thinking she needs his help, leading to her route's bad end. Plus, with the CG for that scene, and the way her face is positioned, it seems as though she's yelling at the player for thinking she needs someone to protect her rather than Hisao.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, if you neglect to do certain quests, talking to those associated with said quests later on will often result in learning that they were handled by the bracer guild or others in Crossbell instead, much to the chagrin of the Special Support Section, and by extension, the player.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a staggering 900 Korok Seeds to collect in the game, given to a giant Korok named Hestu who will upgrade your inventory space in exchange. But you only need about half of the seeds to get all of the upgrades. What happens when you get all of them? Do you get infinite inventory space? An awesome Infinity +1 Sword? Nope, you get "Hestu's Gift", a Korok Seed shaped like a giant golden poop that does nothing but let you watch him dance whenever you want. The game even notes that it "smells terrible," suggesting that it might actually be poop, and was actually confirmed by developers to be Korok feces.
• Collect all of the DNA (hidden collectibles) of the The Lost World: Jurassic Park game, and you get a video transmission from Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm... who tells you to go outside.
• The Lost Vikings:
  • In the first game, the eponymous vikings routinely Lean On The Fourth Wall. Fail often enough and they'll comment on it. If you have to restart fifteen times, Thor will tell them they're doing very badly and they need to shape up.
  • The second game will say you really suck if you die on the first level. As you have to intentionally work at it to die, this is clearly an Easter Egg and doing it will give every character otherwise unobtainable Game-Breaker abilities.
• After some players complained about the endings of Mass Effect 3, the developers added a fourth ending option...which leads to the Reapers wiping out the galactic civilization. Then, for good measure, included a different stargazer scene implying the next cycle did what you were supposed to do: use the Crucible. The game made it clear that the galaxy was not going to win without the Crucible, and the Extended Cut made that clear.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has a somewhat humorous, fourth-wall-breaking one during the "Colonel"'s malfunction, "Honestly, though, you have played the game for a long time. Don't you have anything else to do with your time?"
• Minotaur Hotel: When Storm and P get a little tipsy, Storm starts to ask P a bunch of questions. Eventually, he asks P his top three things about him. Since P is a little weirded out on the idea of starting a romantic relationship with Storm, he answers sarcastically that his three favorite things about him are: his mouth that won't stop asking questions, his horns that scratch the ceiling of his car, and his stench that stinks up the place. Storm laughs at his response and then decides to run a lap so he can get sweatier and smellier. P is not impressed. The game is targeted towards a gay furry demographic, and several works that are targeted towards that same audience tend to play up the smelliness of some of their characters, so this scene can be seen as a cheeky nod towards their audience's... interests.
• Monster Rancher 4 devotes a large part of the story to taking apart competitive players and speedrunners by having many antagonists in the story use methods real-life players use to get ahead. Diehl trains monsters from birth to be fighting machines by using piles of money and training gadgets, letting go of any monsters that don't make the cut. IMa, the region in 2 and the most popular game for raising/training, outclasses FIMBA, the region in 1 with lower stat gains, by using military-style training regimes. Your character deliberately registers in FIMBA to prove they can still win without using such monstrous training methods.
• Lose enough times in a Mortal Kombat game, and Shao Kahn will go "it's official: YOU SUCK."
• In the point-and-click game Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst (and also in both Dire Grove and 13th Skull when the crime computer is on "Snarky" mode), using an object at the wrong place earns the player some, errr, peculiar remarks, like "YOU don't have to worry about brain-eating zombies", "Somewhere, a town is missing its idiot" or "Is a cat walking on your keyboard?".
• While PaRappa the Rapper didn't really insult you for failing, the sequel will gladly mock you and Parappa for screwing up:
  Beard Burger Master: Aw, man! That was bad! And what's with this noodle thing?
  Beard Burger Master: (if you drop below Cool rank) Rest in peace? More like rest in agony!
  Guru Ant: What a kid. You're too immature for me. Get out of here!
  Instructor Moosesha: You're the worst! Come back next year, why don't you?
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: Nenio, a kitsune, has a bit of fun at the Furry Fandom's expense in one Party Banter conversation:
  "Hypothesis: the party's sexual interest in me surged when it became known that I am a kitsune. I am going to survey my comrades in order to confirm my hypothesis. Aasimar boy,^note Meaning Daeran Arendae. Nenio refuses to learn the names of anybody she deems unimportant. what is it about foxes you find sexually appealing? Be precise."
• The Cloaker enemy in PAYDAY 2 tears down several fourth walls to insult and mock the fans that would soon be complaining about him since his kick attacks are a One-Hit Kill.
  Cloaker: Now go to the forums and cry like the little bitch you are!
• N's dialogue in Pokémon Black and White against the trainers who only use Pokémon as tools and only care about competing seems to be a jab against the "Stop Having Fun" Guys part of the fandom.
• Poker Night 2:
  • The following exchange:
    Sam: Hey! I thought we were all friends here?
    Max: It's playing computer poker by itself, Sam. It doesn't have any friends.
  • If the player is eliminated from the tournament:
    Claptrap: You can't leave now! If you're gone, who'll regale me with tales of their epic battles with hygiene and interpersonal relationships?
  • GLaDOS (the dealer) does this almost every single time she speaks to you. But then again, it is GLaDOS after all...
    Although usually a sign of a weak hand, a check can also be used to disguise a stronger hand. In your case, I'll assume it's a sign of confusion.
    The judicious poker player knows the importance of a well-timed fold. And then there's you.
    Wow. That was a clever move that won't come back to bite you in your ample posterior.
    Congratulations, you've stopped listening to your frontal lobe and are going with your gut, where all the feces are.
    The player has been eliminated due to lack of funds. And intelligence.
• The Dude will insult you for Save Scumming in Postal 2.
  • "Didn't you just save?"
  • "My grandmother could beat the game if she saved as much as you do."
  • "Are you saving AGAIN?"
  • He also gets on your case if you cheat, with phrases like "If you say so." and "Wussy!"
• Miss all of El Oscuro's eggs in Rise of the Triad, and you're treated to a fake ending where you save the world.... well, until El Oscuro's spawn rises to power and explodes the Earth. Complete with a .wav file going "Youuuuuuuuuuu suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck."
• Shadowrun Returns features dragons who rule over the world, and are also complete and utter bastards. At one point in the Dragonfall campaign, the player is given the option to side with the villain and Take a Third Option to kill them all. If you do this, the game not only goes to great pains to point out how horrible you are, but the epilogue specifically spells out that the dragons were holding back an even greater evil and you've just doomed the entire human race to a horrific death.
• SimCity 4: The loading screen message "Pixelating Nude Patch" is a jab at The Sims modders who remove the pixelation effect from nude Sims.
• If the player hits a flag in Ski Run (a.k.a. Spectral Skiing), one of the 50 games of Cassette 50, the game will display "HA HA YOU HIT A FLAG" in all caps.
• Beat the first Special Place in Sonic Erazor and the game insults you.
  "If I see such a pathetic excuse of what you call skill again, I will go ahead and disable the checkpoints until you can do this stage while you are asleep!"
• Sonic 1 Remastered, a ROM Hack of Sonic the Hedgehog, changes the text on the normal "No Chaos Emeralds" screen from "SPECIAL STAGE" to "YOU SUCK AT SPECIAL STAGES".
• If you complete a level with an E Rank in Sonic Unleashed, the otherwise epic fanfare is replaced with a version that's a musical trainwreck.
• Spec Ops: The Line is a deconstruction of and Take That! toward the modern military shooter, as well as a Take That! to its players, with plenty of leaning (and breaking) of the fourth wall as the game culminates in an incident where the player murders innocent civilians and blasts the player for finding violence fun. Even the loading screens near the end have such gems as "Do you feel like a Hero yet?", "You're still a good person.", and "This is all your fault."
  Konrad: The truth, Walker, is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not. A hero.
  • Mocked in You Were Hallucinating the Whole Time, which uses the game's logic of accusing you for finding entertainment fun on classic video games.
• In Splatoon:
  • The host of each game will occasionally snark on-air regarding the behavior of certain fatheaded players who think certain weapons are overpowered or blame their team for their own shortcomings.
  • The 26th Sunken Scroll in the first game depicts a fossilized human with a Wii U. The description notes its small skull indicates it likely had little intelligence.
  • During the announcement of Splatoon 2's Grand Finale Splatfest event, Chaos vs. Order, Pearl tries to cheer up an insecure Marina by pointing out their differing popularities, both In-Universe and out. Though exactly how far you choose to interpret that last sentence is up to you.
  Pearl: "You have WAAAY more going for you than just Off The Hook. For one, the fans like you more than they like me. I've seen the internet."
  • Whenever Deep Cut's Splatcasts in Splatoon 3 talk about the Salmon Run mode, Shiver or Frye will always talk about their playstyles for that mode. These playstyles happen to line up with common ways actual players play Salmon Run that causes them to lose, such as ignoring certain enemies just because they don't give out big rewards or focusing on fighting enemies without caring about the actual goal of gathering Golden Eggs. Which of these two hosts talk about it, the other will point out how that's a losing strategy, though sometimes, Big Man will call them both out on it.
• Starflight: A newspaper you can find on the ruins of Earth discusses how people in the distant past (the present time) would spend countless hours in front of screens and living out fantasies. The article goes on to state that the historians believed it caused the downfall of society.
• This is found abundantly in Star Trek: The Game Show, a DOS game from The '90s, which is perhaps to be expected since the host is Q. He has particular fun just before the final round, when he takes stock of the game standings; should one of the players be doing significantly better than the other, his comment is especially dry:
  Q: Well, I can see that one of you has a life.
• In Stellaris, The Deeper Secrets of the Vultaum all but confirms Simulation Theory, meaning the in-game characters are now aware their existence is just a game. The advisor questions what sort of being would create such a cold, cruel galaxy just for enjoyment.
• The trailer for the Edition Select mode for Ultra Street Fighter IV opens with a man representing a fanboy tossing and turning in bed, having nightmares about Sagat's new balanced gameplay and clutching a piece of paper with things like "FIREBALLS TAKE NO DAMAGE!!!!! UPPERCUT TAKES NO DAMAGE!!!!!" written on it to his chest.
• Super Mario Maker has a trio of laughing lips in its custom sound library. Many a mischievous course creator can set them up so that they laugh at the player's shortcomings, some going as far as to make them laugh at you dying.
• Super Paper Mario. The entirety of Chapter 3 is one long Take That! aimed at Nintendo's fanboys/audience. Complete with a stereotypical nerd called Francis who complains about video games he hasn't played on internet message boards and talks about how his first love was an anime character.
• A subtle one is in the Infocom game Suspect where the behavior of an NPC detective is implied to be a recreation of how most players acted when assuming the detective role in the earlier Witness... which is to say, not very competent at all.
• In Tokimeki Memorial 2 Substories: Dancing Summer Vacation, at around the middle of the game, if you decide to train at DanceDanceRevolution before paying a visit to your DDR tournament partner Miyuki, she'll phone you between two training sessions, and, all while being happy to see how serious you are at training, she'll say the following (and will fail to notice afterwards why the protagonist, aka you, feels awkward after that!):
  Miyuki: But~ Miyuki is so happy to hear this~! After all, with su~ch a beautiful day like this, young people shouldn't shut themselves in their room the whole day playing video games~!
• Completing the Treasure's Best folder in Bangai-O Spirits results in an ending in which the protagonists explain that the ending solely exists to prevent players from complaining about a lack of one. They also discourage you from selling the game because it's too short and encourage you to exchange custom levels with the Level Editor.
• Ultimate Custom Night: Some of Mr. Hippo's comically-long kill quotes seem to be poking fun at players who over-analyze the lore of Five Nights at Freddy's and try to puzzle out the meaning of every seemingly inconsequential detail.
  Mr. Hippo: And… I said to him, "Orville, not every story has to have significance, y'know? Sometimes, a… y'know, sometimes, a story's just a story. You try to read into every little thing, and find meaning in everything anyone says, you'll just drive yourself crazy."
• In Umineko: When They Cry, Episode 8's climax is one massive Take That! towards the audience, as the creator had gotten tired of the fans demanding 'the true solution' to everything instead of trying to work it out themselves. The main characters are Zerg Rushed by massive, stupid-theory-sprouting Butler-Goats that ate away at the mystery and demanded answers. Subtle.
• Um Jammer Lammy has Teriyaki Yoko insulting Lammy and not so subtly insulting the player at the same time should you fail the stage.
  Yoko: Start all over! You should be banned from every game!
  Lammy: From every game!? Even this one?
• Undertale:
  • If the player kills a lot but not all of the monsters in the game, Sans will mock you for your lack of drive, saying that if you're going to be a killer, you're kind of half-hearted about it. Not only does he call you a horrible person, but he then declares that you suck at being evil.
  • Every time you die to Sans at the end of a Genocide Run, he mocks you for dying with his never-fading smile on his face. The snarky comments get increasingly harsher every time you die, essentially rubbing salt on the wound until he simply decides to stop counting when you reach 12 deaths, simply brushing you off and saying "let's just get to the point".
  • Sans as a boss himself is a huge "Screw you" to the audience, as he essentially breaks every rule established in the game to deliberately become That One Boss, acknowledges he's breaking said rules and taunts you, grinning all the way through.
    Sans: what? you think i'm just going to stand there and take it?
  • The game also contains jabs at players who helped crowdfund the game, delivered by the shopkeeper at Snowdin Town, and to the audience of YouTube Let's Play channels, delivered by Flowey. The jab at Let's Plays is also notable for audiences that want to see the Genocide path in the game without actually doing it themselves, with Flowey implying that people who watch the murder sprees are worse than the players who commit to them.
    Flowey: At least we're better than those sickos that stand around and WATCH it happen.
  • "Don't you have anything better to do?" — One of the most prominent Arc Words in the game.
• Virtue's Last Reward has this gem of a line during the tutorial for the jellyfish puzzle in the Treatment Center.
  "If you move one of the yellow jellyfish to the hole instead, you are a failure and we are very disappointed in you."
• WarioWare: If you lose a life when playing through Ashley's story mode/microgames, she'll call you an idiot for it.
• The Wolfenstein franchise has a tradition of mocking players who select the lowest difficulty setting; it is named, "Can I Play, Daddy?", and shows BJ wearing a baby bonnet and with a binky in his mouth.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game had complaints from beta players who felt the Maelstrom was not "epic" enough, considering its importance in game lore. Blizz's tongue-in-cheek response was to add Epicus Maximus, a guitar-axe-playing undead riding a T-rex riding a rocket-powered shark with lasers on its head. It has since had cameo appearances in a hologram of what appeals to degenerate tech-lovers and the Brawler's Guild.
  • The short story "Over Water" was about a bitter Alliance soldier who felt that Varian's decision to make peace with the Horde after the Siege of Orgrimmar let them off the hook with no real consequences and denied the Alliance a chance at some well-deserved payback for the numerous atrocities the Horde had committed during the war, an obvious stand in for pro-Alliance players who'd been voicing the same complaints. During the story, he encounters a group of Pandaren fishermen who teach him that it's not about how many Orcs you kill, but how good a story you can get out of it. Obvious meta is obvious.
  • A quick one targeted at people complaining that Pandaren were going to bring a bunch of furries into the game comes from one of the female Pandaren /silly emotes.
    Female Pandaren: "I was talking to this Tauren the other day- no, Worgen. Ugh, which one's a cow and which one's a dog? All these talking animals are stupid!"
  • In Legion, leatherworks get a quest to make barding for mounts, to keep you from being dismounted when attacked. The quest NPC says "I keep telling people to stop running through packs of wild animals, but apparently that's not the fastest way to travel."
  • At one point in the Legion expansion, the player is shown Illidan's defeat at the end of Burning Crusade from Illidan's point of view. Hilariously, the raid members who defeat him (i.e. the players themselves) are constantly chattering, complaining, and/or acting like children.
• Done via Leaning on the Fourth Wall in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. During a plot mission the peanut gallery sees an alien entertainment device (a weird colored light show doohickey) and remarks:
  Dr. Shen: Is this what the aliens do for fun? At least they're not playing ... computer games.

Web Animation

• Camp Camp occasionally takes jabs at the shipping-obsessed part of its fanbase. Neil's chatbot goes rogue after listening to "shipping people's baes" one too many times, and the local garbage pickup service is called "Shipping Community Trash".
• Diamond in the Rough (Touhou), much like its canonical counterpart, deals with tons of "Gappy Stus" (a type of self-insert character incredibly prevalent in Touhou fanfiction which somehow arrives in Gensokyo, may get some powers, and then messes things up for their own amusement) coming to Gensokyo, having fun at the expense of everyone, and getting murdered and harvested by Yukari when they slip up and make a huge mistake of some kind. The movie proper is about one of these types and while, initially, he is the same kind of self-unaware and unrepentant jerk who doesn't realize how Gensokyo is not a fairy-tale playground while he causes a lot of trouble, he does eventually turn around and try to help out. Which only makes it worse. At the end, he dies, though he does achieve forgiveness and is allowed reincarnation rather than a one-way trip straight to Hell. Aesop for the audience and fan fic writers in particular: leave it to professionals like Reimu or Marisa, not some random kid Self-Insert.
• The Final Fantasy XIII in a Nutshell video delivers one towards the Final Fantasy fans that over-exaggerate their hatred towards the XIII trilogy. A lawyer comes and delivers a class action lawsuit to Lightning from fans for damages to the franchise. According to the lawyer, their hatred is so excessive that they consider Lightning worse than Hitler. She responds by calling the fans a bunch of whiny, entitled bitches. The lawyer agrees with her on that, despite them being his client.
• Homestar Runner: Strong Bad does this a lot, especially in his Fourth-Wall Mail Slot cartoons, Strong Bad Email.
  • The episode that took the cake and ran with it, though, was SBEmail #188 "fan club", where it turns out that his loser brother Strong Sad formed a Strong Bad fan club with Strong Mad and The Cheat called "the Deleteheads". He also mercilessly took a jab at Fan Fics in the same episode.
  • In the very first Strong Bad Email, "some kinda robot", SB closes out by saying "Keep sending me your questions, and I will make fun of you... I mean, answer them."
  • In "Trogday 08", Strong Bad accuses "you Internet types" of running his creation Trogdor the Burninator into the ground.
    Strong Bad: Just like you did zombies, pirates, ninjas, and Strong Bad! Er, wait, no. Yeah!
  • A promo video for Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People had Strong Bad dropping the title of the game, then turning to the audience and adding, "But you can play, too."
• The Stinger of the YouTube Poop "Gaston and Frollo Get a Life" has Frollo telling the viewers, "For the love of God, don't just quote me, leave a more clever comment! And learn how to spell!"
• Zero Punctuation:
  • This dialogue (also getting in two digs at himself at the same time):
    Yahtzee: A nerd, after all, is someone who obsesses over something, like the cultural impact of gaming, or people who criticise same in silly internet videos."
  • Also, seeing the face of the viewer is apparently enough to make an imp's head explode.
  • And one used for Hypocritical Humor that got reused as an ad.
    Yahtzee: Fans are clingy, complaining dipshits who will never, ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill, tremulous voices the happier you will be for it. Incidentally, why not buy a Zero Punctuation T-Shirt?
  • From his Super Mario 3D World review:
    Scroll down now and read the first five comments under this video! You should start feeling a cold, metallic sensation because you're now holding a gun to your head.
• Loona from Helluva Boss garnered a very large and somewhat perverse fandom after just the pilot episode. In the third episode of the series, there is a joke aimed right at said fanbase who lusted after the character for months after the pilot's release.
  Blitzo: (talking to Loona) You know the kinda FREAKS up there who would drool all over you.
  [Cue I.M.P. all collectively looking with disapproval at the camera]
• Underverse:
  • In XTALE 0, Ink breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience and the Undertale fandom in general; particularly, all the creators who abandoned the fandom and deleted their works over the years because they thought their creations weren't good enough. He says that it is essentially our fault that he took the decisions he did, as he does not want to be forgotten. He essentially presents XGaster as a replacement for us.
  • In a more indirect manner, XGaster is a Deconstruction of the perfectionist author. It is outright stated that he is never satisfied with his own ideas, and keeps redoing his work over and over and over again, accepting nothing less than some unobtainable concept of perfection. Many times he even relies on plagiarism and idea-stealing; for example, for Timeline 3 he directly copied the fan-favourite Alternate Universe Fic Underswap. His behavior overall mirrors many, many creators of all genres and art forms, and many viewers have admitted that they see their own behavior reflected in XGaster. However, unlike us, XGaster has to live with his creations, and they are NOT happy to be continuously discarded.
• Sr. Pelo addressed impatient fans who wanted the release of the last chapter of Underpants by creating a fake video where a deformed sans appeared while the boss theme was played with only Pelo's voice. Then he goes berserk and starts critizicing the fandom for being too impatient.

Webcomics

• The 8-Bit Theater strip "Unwisely Pissing Off the Fanbase" claims to do this but is actually more Self-Deprecation. Many feel the strip's vast over-reliance on Anticlimax is one of these as well. Brian Clevinger has repeatedly stated that the best jokes are the ones played on the reader.
• Andrew Hussie, creator of Homestuck, does this all the time to the Fan Dumb if something is misinterpreted or some logical leap not made.
  GA: Sorry I Thought That Was Obvious.
  • The cherubs are parodies of the fandom and the Hate Dumb respectively.
  • Many of the Pre-Scratch trolls are based on fandom-specific Memetic Personality Changes of their descendants. ^note Eridan is insecure about his love life, so Cronus is a sex pest with No Sense of Personal Space; Nepeta ships her friends, so Meulin is obsessed with shipping to the exclusion of all else.
  • The deliberately nonsensical nature of leprechaun romance makes fun of fans for obsessing over troll romance above the story itself.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The ending of the strip "Running Away" takes a potshot at the more obsessed fans of the comic.
    Vaarsuvius: I must not engage in any demanding mental tasks. I must empty my mind completely, while still progressing at my task.
    [The panel zooms in on the book in V's hand. It reads "Finding Plot Holes For Dummies".]
    Vaarsuvius: Ahhh... Perfect.
  • The mass-murdering barbarian Thog became a fan-favourite, which is then mirrored in-universe when he becomes a gladiator of such efficacy that he becomes too popular to simply kill off. The following line lampshading this has the additional bonus of applying to the speaker, a mass-murdering, sociopathic Tin Tyrant who also became a fan-favorite by merit of his sheer charisma and being Genre Savvy.
    Tarquin: It's weird, no matter how many people he kills, the audience still thinks he's lovable.
• Played seriously in Terminal Lance. A photo of a boot corporal holding an umbrella for the President while he gave a speech was met with derision and declarations to tell him to hold his own umbrella... from Talking Heads to other servicefolk^note (for the uninitiated, the POTUS is the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, and is everyone's commanding officer. The strip has the corporal complain, whereupon the President about tears his head off, and author Max Uriarte directly calls out the people who said this in The Rant.
  Uriarte: “I would have told him to fuck off and hold his own umbrella.” No you wouldn’t. Shut up. We’re Marines, if the President of the fucking United States asks you to hold a fucking umbrella, you hold a fucking umbrella. [...] He’s the President, he rates an umbrella. Get over it.

Web Original

• AMV Hell, during its Challenge series, has nearly Once an Episode appearances of Jem, eliciting complaints from fans that she's a Western cartoon and so doesn't belong in an anime compilation. In Challenge 19, there's a clip dedicated to Jem singing, while pasted clips of user comments and her Japanese creator mock the whiners. During the voting for best clip in that video, it tied for first.
• Becoming YouTube has a lot of this.
  Ben: Thanks for watching my first YouTube video. Next week's video is about you, the audience. You'll come back for that, won't you, you narcissist!
• Big Bill Hell's: It starts by telling the entire city of Baltimore to go fuck themselves, and spirals out of control from there.
  "If you're dumb enough to buy a new car this weekend, you're a big enough schmuck to come to Big Bill Hell's Cars!"
• CLW Entertainment: "Doraemon Has A Message" is a short video in which Doraemon responds to requests from fans. He isn't too happy about their requests:
  Doraemon: If I see so much as one comment asking where the next episode is, I'm going to come to your house and steal all your peanut M&M's!
• Commentary! The Musical, the musical commentary for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, calls out the audience for being pathetic enough to listen to a musical commentary for a web video in the first place:
  Hope you had fun / ‘Cause now we’re done / You’ve listened to every word / Seeing it through / Makes each of you / A huge f*cking nerd
• Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv) has a chart featuring the brain-size of the average abridged series viewer.
• French Baguette Intelligence: Apology Video Gets Me Cancelled starts with Mr. E asking Fuck Cares to apologise for something that Bowl said, only for Fuck Cares to call them stupid and go on a rant about how it is the audience's fault and that they should apologise to him for making him cry.
• Fictosophy: "The Best Case Scenario" shows a fictionalized Donald Trump calling out his own voters.
• In an episode of Game Grumps Jon and Arin had just finished some very stressful levels in Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The password for them at the end of the Ants level comes out to be "FKYQ"
  Jontron Dude, the..dude the password is "FKYQ"! "Fuck you" it seriously is.
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting:
  Derek: "You know Nightshade, some people don't like this game."
  Nightshade: "Really?"
  Derek: "Yeah."
  Nightshade: "Like who?"
  Derek: "Some people (gestures at camera) on the internet."
  Nightshade:' (looks towards camera) *Beat* "Fuck you."
• During Episode 33 of the Hat Films podcast "Hat Chat", the Sirs do politely, but rather firmly, dismiss the criticism that people have of Turpster joining them for games, arguing that the fandom are reacting too viciously to the format being changed.
• The hentai website nhentia has the small banner "Chat with other nhentai users!" shown near the bottom of the page. When it isn't showing cute girls from various anime and video games it's jokingly comparing its userbase to freaks (as shown by clips of youtuber Melon Pan), creeps, hooligans (as shown by a group of slavs or anime girls wearing tracksuits and squatting), cavemen, literal Nazis/Hitler, or imbecilic baboons among other negative stereotypes.
• Meduka Meguca: After the creators received a massive amount of hate-mail for how long episodes took to come out, they used Kyoko's after-episode scene to tell the 'fans' what the team thought of their responses — even replying directly to a few — and culminating in a simple message: "Sending nasty messages won't make an episode come out any faster [...] Leave Director Chii alone."
• Once some Brazilian fans started complaining a few decades too late that Wednesday kept the long-standing Dub Name Change of Wandinha, Netflix took to Twitter to call them out by posting a changed version of the show's title card, using the day of the week's name in Portuguese.
• In The Nostalgia Critic review of The Care Bears Movie, when a character brainwashes an audience and makes them start fighting, the critic yells "Oh no! He's turned them into Youtube commenters!"
  • He died in 2012, but then returned in 2013 with a different wall colour behind him. When fans made comments about how the old wall was better (with vrying levels of pleasantness and obnoxiousness), he delivers one of these:
    "I thought the most important part of the Nostalgia Critic... was the Nostalgia Critic. Not the wall behind him!"
  • From Son of the Mask onwards, the trope has been included more often in reviews. The most glaring example was "The Top 11 South Park Episodes", a topic the fans chose when Doug asked if he was allowed to do a Top 11, where he started out hating the fans, them annoying him, and finally him screeching virgin-shaming insults at them.
• Spoony gets one in during his LP of Terror TRAX: Track of the Vampire:
  Graves: I get it. She was scamming losers who can't get real dates.
  Spoony: Same kind of losers who watch let's plays instead of meeting girls.
• Team Four Star began running a Pokemon Nuzlocke playthrough. As their play and recall of game mechanics is not perfect the videos have garnered a large number of critical and often mocking responses from the franchise's devotees. They became increasingly dismissive of the criticism and when considering whether to evolve a Charizard actually held off just to spite the fans due to the hate-hate relationship.
• Artist Steve Casino has many pieces involving old game cartridges. Following some comments angry at him 'destroying' beloved titles, he always makes sure to remove the actual game part — the circuit board — and damage it to spite such complainers. He also at times compiles fan mail highlighting such negative responses, which usually get scathing answers (including a reminder that the games were purchased cheap on eBay, so it's not like a destruction of rarities).
• Ultra Fast Pony:
  • The episode "A Library With No Twilight" gives quite a bit of characterization to the series' Lemony Narrator. Specifically, his name is Phil, and he's a complete creepazoid. Then the episode ends with the text, "Phil is a brony, exactly like you! YES! JUST LIKE YOU!"
  • In "Derp and Destruction", Twilight justifies her completely gratuitous recaps by claiming that they're for the audience's benefit.
    Rarity: Nobody's that stupid, Twilight.
    Twilight: They watch this show. They have to be a little bit stupid.
  • In "The Longest Engagement":
    Celestia: Kind of weird, I guess, me watching them. I wonder if anyone's watching me watching them. Wow, that would be weird! And also pathetic.
• WHAT COLOR ARE YOU?: After bitterly concluding that their quiz was a waste of time and that they can feel their life slipping away from them, the creator demands to know why the viewer is taking such a stupid quiz and if you even realize how much of your life you're wasting by taking it.
• The What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? episode "Hummingbird Hell" contains this jab:
  Nash: ...Gentlemen, and I'm using the term loosely because you're watching my show...
• In Chapter 26.3 of Worm, Clockblocker complains that "[s]ome dingbats online speculated that I had a thing for Weaver, and it took off." This is, of course, a direct jab at the substantial Shipping contingent among the fans who insist these two characters would be awesome together.
• The Yogscast have had more than a few moments of this, largely in response to the Fan Dumb and "Stop Having Fun" Guys.
  • In this episode of Yognews, Lewis Brindley addresses just why comments were turned off for nearly two moons, at which point we see various Yogscast members interrupt him.
    Simon Lane: FIRST! FIRST!
    Sjin: FIRST... second...
    Duncan Jones: Is Simon really dead? ^note This was after the infamous Google Plus changeover on YouTube, resulting in waves of people claiming that Simon Lane was dead and trying to scam Yognauts out of money. This was the main reason why the comments section was banned, though all the other comments had something to do with it too.
    Hannah Rutherford: Is this The YoGPoD? More Yogpod! More Yogpod!
    Parv: Please check out my channel! It's Youtube dot com, forward slash ParvPlays!
    Kim Richards: Um, um... where's Shadow of Israphel?
  Simon: Hi, hi! My seven year old daughter watched the Yogscast... YOU SWORE AND NOW SHE'S DEAD!

  Sjin: OMG, this is painful to watch. Thumbs up so Lewis sees!

  Kim: I am Dave, and I have the balls!
  At this point, Lewis makes an effort to shove all the annoying commentators out of the room. They all begin screaming nonsensically.

  Simon: WHY IS THERE ONLY 301+ VIEWS BUT OVER 4000 LIKES? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE! GG YOUTUBE!
  • In this episode of Prop Hunt, Hat Films and InTheLittleWood take a very sharp jab at the fans who believe Martyn has replaced Sips forever on their Garry's Mod content, as opposed to Sips, y'know, not being available.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • The "Fionna and Cake" episodes, especially the first one, is an odd example of this. While it generally pokes fun at fanfiction, ending with the reveal that the whole episode was a fic that the Ice King wrote and forced Finn and Jake to listen to him read, the concept itself resulted from one of the show's artists making said gender-swapped fanart for the show herself after work and the creator finding out about it. At which point he thought it would be fun for her to direct an actual episode starring her versions of the characters.
  • "All The Little People" also pokes fun at shippers and fanfic writers when Finn discovers a bag of miniature versions of himself and his friends (left in his pocket by Magic Man) and starts messing around with them. Though he's initially taken by all the drama he's causing, he soon starts feeling guilty when he sees how unhappy he's making them with his meddling in their relationships.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • In the episode "The Catfish", Gumball claims that he no longer searches his own name online because every time he closes his eyes, he sees the fan art of him that he was unfortunate enough to stumble upon.
  • The later episode "The Shippening" dedicates itself entirely to poking fun at the concept of fanfiction/fanart, via Sarah writing fanfiction and fanart about the citizens of Elmore in a magic notebook that ends up affecting them in real life, and it is glorious.
• In America: The Motion Picture, Geronimo and John Henry are seen laughing at Samuel Adams' jingoistic ignorance and insistence that they won Vietnam, with John saying that if you want to get through to white people "you’d have to put your message in like, I don’t know, the dumbest thing possible, like a cartoon or something".
• The American Dad! episode "Familyland" starts with Bullock (ie, Sir Patrick Stewart) giving a voiceover that involves reading the sign for Familyland to the audience. He then asks why he had to read it since presumably the audience could do that for themselves, only to be told that, no, the audience can't read.
• Animaniacs
  • The original series made fun of the more overzealous members of their Periphery Demographic in the famous "Please, Please, Please Get a Life Foundation" sketch (which features a bunch of sterotypical geeks rattling off Animaniacs trivia and nitpicks culled from an actual list found on the Animaniacs newsgroup).
  • The theme song for the reboot includes a line poking fun at fans who complain about changes made to the show: "The trolls will say we're so passé, but we did meta first!"
• In the "Ember Island Players" episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, though largely rooted in several jokes poking fun at the show itself, as one joke firmly aimed at the fanbase. The play that the Gaang is watching, "The Boy in the Iceberg", makes Katara and Zuko a couple, with Actress!Katara directly stating that she sees Aang as a little brother, not a lover. The real Katara and Zuko quickly share a disturbed glance as soon as the actors start flirting, before shifting away from each other in discomfort. This is naturally a jab towards Zutara, which was a very popular Fan-Preferred Couple that the creators regularly poked fun at and mocked in interviews.
• The Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Legends of the Dark Mite" contains an Author Filibuster from Paul Dini, in which Bat-Mite takes a jab at overzealous adult fans who think everything needs to be Darker and Edgier to be good, as well as those who write off every new Batman production as inferior to Batman: The Animated Series (which Dini co-created).
  "Batman's rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure, this is a lighter incarnation, but it's certainly no less valid and true to the character's roots than the tortured avenger crying out for mommy and daddy."
  • The show's Grand Finale also took a jab at the fandom's Contested Sequel tendencies. Batmite goes through lengthy attempts to get Brave and the Bold cancelled because he wants a more serious series like B:TAS. When he succeeded, the show ends up getting replaced with a CGI Batgirl series. Batmite immediately starts complaining about preferring Brave and the Bold, especially when he realizes he's not going to be able to show up in a Darker and Edgier series.
• During the episode of The Boondocks where Grandpa fights an old blind man, the show stops before the killing blow and Huey muses to the audience that they could be reading a book right now. The screen stays still a few more seconds, like the show is telling you to do something better with your time than watch two old men beat each other.
• The announcer on Danger Mouse would start prattling off hypothetical questions at the end of some episodes, and at the end of a particular episode he quipped "Why do you watch this stuff?"
• The creators of Daria pulled this in the episode "Camp Fear" where Our Heroine is accosted by a clingy "friend" from her childhood who's completely obsessed with her. The real kicker, though is that MTV had earlier held a contest where fans Erin Mills and Michelle Klein-Hass won the right to get their likenesses made into background characters, it was this out of all the episodes they could have done, that they were used in.
• The final episode of Darkwing Duck took place centuries in the future, with Darkwing's memorabilia now kept in a history museum. The museum guide mentions that in the distant past, Darkwing's adventures were even serialized in an animated TV show, but the "primitive creatures" who watched the show went extinct shortly thereafter.
• Family Guy: "You know what really grinds my gears? You America. Fuck you! Diane?"
  • In "Boys Do Cry", Peter begins delivering a speech about parenting. It gradually turns into an attack on Moral Guardians who claim that shows like Family Guy are evil. To really sell the point, he looks directly at the audience while finishing the speech:
    Peter: Like, for instance, if you're watching a TV show and you decide to take your values from that...you're an idiot. Maybe you should take responsibility for what values your kids are getting. Maybe you shouldn't be letting your kids watch certain shows in the first place if you have such a big problem with them, instead of blaming the shows themselves. (By now looking right at the screen) Yeah.
  • The scrolling text of It's A Trap! (the third installment of Peter Griffin's Star Wars trilogy) spends its time ranting about having to do a third film. Midway through, the scrolls' writer claims to be psychic and makes a prediction about the viewer: "You're a guy, watching this. Alone".
• From the Futurama episode "The Why of Fry":
  The Big Brain: Detecting trace amounts of mental activity, possibly a dead weasel or a cartoon viewer.
  • "Here's a definition for you. Idiot. Noun. YOU! HA!"
  • Implied in the commentary to "The Prisoner of Benda", with the hookup of Fry (in Zoidberg's body) and Leela (in the professor's), especially to those who have been pressuring the writers to hook them up onscreen.
  • This one, after a fanservice-y photoshoot that saved Planet Express from bankruptcy:
    Gender-Swapped Leela: Thank God most of our fans are huge perverts!
• Various scenes in Gravity Falls have briefly-seen cryptograms and other such secrets hidden in them. In the episode "Carpet Diem", Grunkle Stan's book on puberty has a cryptogram on one page that pokes fun at fans who try to find all of these Easter Eggs; when decoded, it says "Puberty is the greatest mystery of all. Also: go outside and make friends."
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • One Couch Gag has Mandy deliver a backwards message that translates to "Cartoons will rot your brain."
  • At the end of "Tricycle of Terror", Sir Raven informs the audience "If you've been paying attention, it's because you're a nerd with nothing better to do."
• Invader Zim episode "GIR Goes Crazy and Stuff" was made to mess with viewers who found GIR to be adorable and didn't think he should ever be anything other than cute.
• In one episode of Kaeloo, Stumpy says he thinks a show about a frog who transforms into a hulking monster when she gets angry^note The show's premise in a nutshell would make a good kids' show. Mr. Cat's response?
  Mr. Cat: Who in their right mind would watch crap like that?
  • In another episode, the main four make their own TV show and it's clearly a parody of the actual show. It makes no sense to anyone and everyone hates it except Stumpy, the resident moron. Stumpy also mentions that the only reason he liked it was shipping the characters in their show who were supposed to be based on Mr. Cat and Kaeloo, a reference to how many fans ship those two and focus exclusively on their relationship instead of the other aspects of the show^note However, in-universe, Stumpy has been shown to ship the real Mr. Cat and Kaeloo as well.
  • In the finale of Season 4, the characters painstakingly explain to the audience how an episode of a cartoon is made by walking them through the process. The audience demands to know when they can see new episodes and Kaeloo explains that, as they just saw, it takes a very long time to make episodes, they may have to wait a while for the show's fifth season. The audience instantly turns against the characters and starts pelting them with trash because they want a new episode right this instant, not unlike the fans who constantly complain about the hiatuses between seasons being too long^note The hiatuses can last for years, and Season 3 was released five years after Season 2 with one episode released in the middle.
• The special features for Metalocalypse are LOADED with these. At the end of an extended scene of Nathan Explosion recording a Shakespeare audiobook, the viewer is told to take his hand off his cock, get off the couch, and get a job. At least one Credits Gag repeatedly tells viewers to go fuck themselves. Facebones, the band mascot, has blistering contempt for Klokateers and civilians (in-universe) AND for viewers (in special features).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the Season 2 finale, Princess Cadence comments on Pinkie Pie's plans for her wedding reception: "Perfect! ...if we were celebrating a six-year-old's birthday party." Justified, though, since it's really the Big Bad impersonating the real Cadence.
  • "Spike at Your Service" pokes fun at fanfiction writers. Rainbow Dash mentions writing a novel about an awesome pegasus who's the best flyer ever and becomes captain of the Wonderbolts, to which Rarity snarks "However did you come up with that ingeniously woven intricate plot-line?"
  • The episode "Fame and Misfortune" pokes fun at the show's Periphery Demographic. Partway though the episode, a crowd of ponies storm Twilight's castle to complain about the details found within the friendship journal that the main character's published, focusing on the minutiae of the worldbuilding and character arcs instead of the actual friendship lessons contained within: even calling out common fan complaints like Fluttershy learning the same lesson over and over or Twilight having wings. It also inverts the "take that" with two little foals, representing the show's core demographic, who come by afterward to genuinely thank the Mane Six for helping them become better friends.
• Phineas and Ferb's Central Theme is that kids should make every minute count, get creative, and seize the day, rather than sit around and watch TV. Take the lyrics to "Hey Ferb" from the Musical Episode:
  Phineas: Glancing back we're gonna be / Didn't sit all day and watch TV / I don't thing anyone can disagree / The world is possibilities!
  • Or Candace's lyrics in "Summer Belongs to You":
  "Don't waste a minute sitting on that chair / The world is calling, so just get out there / You can see forever and your dreams are all in view / Yes, it's true / Summer Belongs to You!"
  • The episode "The Beak" has an odd example in its second song, making fun of the viewers for being weaker than the eponymous superhero.
  "You really are pretty lame compared to the Beak!"
  • There's also Irving, a nerdy outcast sort of character whose obsession with the titular duo is taken by some fans as a playful dig at the fandom.
  • "Nerds of a Feather" has Doofenshmirtz pitching a show to a TV executive named Jeff McGarland (voiced by Seth MacFarlane). Jeff loves it but suggests that they give the main character (based on Perry) a girlfriend. Doof is so disgusted by the idea that he walks away and refuses to let the show be greenlit. The situation is a dig at fans who have requested that Perry get a love interest despite the creators stating that he is married to his job.
  • Star Wars fans have a reputation for being notoriously protective of the franchise, so when the show did a parody episode two years after Disney bought Star Wars, The Opening Narration concludes with the MST3K Mantra, "None of this is canon, so just relax."
• The Powerpuff Girls episode "City of Clipsville," with the girls and the Professor recounting past adventures, was intended as a Take That! to PPG fan fiction, most notably those that paired teen Powerpuffs with teen Rowdyruff Boys. It backfired, as it didn't happen.
• ReBoot: When Enzo and Dot are in a zombie shooter game, they discuss the brutality of it.
  Enzo: In the next level, the zombies have flesh!
  Dot: What kind of sick creature gets enjoyment out of playing this sort of game? ''*both glare at the camera*
• The Rick and Morty episode "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat" has Rick visit a universe inhabited by fascist versions of the cast. Fascist Morty is an explicit reference to "toxic" fans of the show who accuse creators of making it political and demand a return to early standalone episodes. Besides wearing a Nazi uniform, he kills his own uncle for "going political" and forces our universe's Rick to accompany him on a "classic Rick and Morty adventure". Rick soon points that he's always negative, talking about things he doesn't like but never suggesting anything he'd like to do. Fascist Morty replies that he likes Mr. Meeseeks, a one-note Season 1 character and fan favorite, and Rick uses it to get rid of him. The sketch also features Gearhead for no real reason other than he's a Season 1 character.
• The Robot Chicken sketch Meteor! has Steven Tyler throw up and claim to have just shot smack into both his eyeballs. Cut to a stereotypical overweight nerd in a bedroom crammed with memorabilia spitting his drink out and yelling that he has to write an angry letter because Steven Tyler's been clean for years.
• Sealab 2021 became known for these in its later seasons, but none as direct as the episode "Tornado Shanks", where the titular Shanks announces he was not going to leave and that he expected fans to go "crying and whining and bellyaching" about how they didn't like him. To that, he had one response, setting the stage for a lot of jokes at the audience's expense.
  Shanks: You don't like me? Fine. Watch anny-may.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Bye Bye Nerdie", Lisa discovers that bullies detect nerds via their scent, ends with the bully Francine sniffing straight ahead of her and leaping at the audience.
  • In the later seasons of the show — starting around Season 8's "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", an extended riff on this theme — nearly any appearance of Comic Book Guy heralds one of these. In "Saddlesore Galactica" he practically breaks the Fourth Wall in order to make the point.
  Homer: Does anyone care what this guy thinks?
  Crowd: No!
  • An in-universe example appears in a sequence in "The Otto Show", when Bart daydreams about being a jaded, bitter rock star. During a concert he informs the audience that he's going to play a new song entitled "Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs". Cue an outburst of squealing and fawning from said fans.
  • Word of God said this was supposed to be the point of "The Principal and the Pauper", where Principal Skinner is exposed as an impostor named Armin Tamzarian.
  Ken Keeler: This [episode] is about a community of people who like things just the way they are. Skinner's not really close to these people — you know, he's a minor character — but they get upset when someone comes in and says, 'This is not really the way things are,' and they run the messenger out of town on the rail. When the episode aired, lo and behold, a community of people who like things just the way they are got mad. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that this episode is about the people who hate it.
  • Deep Space Homer" has an in-universe example Played for Laughs:
  Homer: TV respects me. It laughs with me, not at me!
  Guy on TV: *points at the camera and laughs* You stupid!
• One Sonic Boom episode has Mark the Tapir, a nerdy, obsessive fanboy of Sonic who creeps everybody out with his stalker-ish mannerisms. It isn't hard at all to see him as a jab at certain members of the Sonic The Hedgehog fan community. It even features a jab at a specific fan, the infamous author of Sonichu, by featuring Mark showing off a portrait of Sonic with flesh-colored arms^note For the curious, said author of Sonichu was fiercely adamantly against Sonic's blue arms, to the point she attacked a cardboard standie of Sonic in a Gamestop, maced an employee who tried to stop her, and was arrested. Seriously.
• In-Universe in the South Park episode "Guitar Queer-O" when Stan and Kyle finally reach their goal in scoring 1,000,000 points on Guitar Hero, instead of saying something along the lines of "You're a rock star!" the game mocks them and says they're fags for playing the game so much.
• There's a playful dig at comic fans in an episode of The Super Hero Squad Show:
  Scarlet Witch: What do they write about me on your message boards?
  The Falcon: Great things! They write nothing but really nice, positive things!
  Scarlet Witch: Liar! Nobody ever writes positive things on message boards!
• A YouTube-like template seen in some episodes of Teen Titans Go! (used when someone is watching a video online) has a pretty noticeable video in the suggestions box titled: "TEEN TITANZ NO!!!" uploaded by "ChildHoodDestroyed" and bears the thumbnail of a crying baby, obviously poking fun at the show's sudden Hatedom and suggesting that the writers see fanboys of the original Teen Titans who long for new episodes of the "real" Teen Titans as a bunch of crybabies. Fake videos related to the Too Good to Last action-oriented shows (which the same fans accuse TTG! of replacing) Young Justice and Green Lantern: The Animated Series (such as advertising a lost episode or something like that) are also seen in the same area.
  • "Let's Get Serious" is an episode dedicated to mocking the fans who complain about the show not being serious enough, as well as those who (erroneously) blame the series for the cancellation of Young Justice.
  • "The Return of Slade". Slade does not actually appear in the episode. The actual plot, in which Beast Boy and Cyborg try to improve a clown into being "more like they remember" clowns being after being disappointed by his kiddiness, is an extended jab at the hatedom of the series for getting worked up over a kids' cartoon.
  • "The Fourth Wall", which is another extended jab at fans who complain at the Titan's personalities and consider the show inferior to the original show.
  • In the episode "Squash and Stretch" the Titans decide to become more cartoonish in an attempt to kill a squirrel, and become Looney Tunes parodies. They then begin making remarks such as "The Teen Titans are way better as silly cartoons!" and "It feels good to not be weighed down by character development, yo!", further taunting older Teen Titans fans who lament the show's existence.
  • There's also "The Titans Show", the final episode of the "Island Adventures" event, where it turns out that the whole thing was staged by their foe Control Freak to make the Teen Titans more interesting to watch for all of their enemies. Starfire expresses shock and disbelief that so many people who hate the Titans would spend so much energy on watching them. After that, the Titans look at "hurtful" comments on a Tumblr pastiche called DCUmblr consisting of childish insults and stereotypical fan complaints about Teen Titans Go! being inferior to the original series. Control Freak then adds that the opinions of those on the Internet are not an accurate determination of success, and he shows a two-piece pie chart with the smaller part of it labeled "Haters" to prove his point.
  • The episode "The Cape" is another jab at fans of the original Teen Titans by being a less than flattering Gag Dub of it.
  • In "Brain Percentages", when Cyborg points out that the "10% of your brain" myth only exists to be used as a plot for TV, movies, and books, Starfire questions if those media would ever lie. Robin says they wouldn't, then it cuts to an image claiming that the sixth season of the original Teen Titans would be coming soon.
• The Total Drama character Sierra is a obsessive fangirl of the Show Within a Show. She has a crush on one of the characters who she is always being a general creep towards. She also knows lots of creepy personal information about the cast.
  Sierra: Did you know that Cody slept with a stuffed emu named Jerry until he was.... Well, okay he still does.
  Noah: And you know this how?
  Sierra: I called his aunt once, I pretended to be a telemarketer.
  Noah: Ooh, stalkerlicious.
  • Alejandro and Sierra, being newcomers to an already established cast who get much farther in the game than most contestants ever had thanks to New Powers as the Plot Demands, could be a jab towards OP fanfic characters. Notably, both end up largely disliked in-universe, Alejandro thanks to his many skills making him a power-hungry villain, and Sierra because she treats the other characters like she's still watching them on TV.
  • The Pahkitew Island cast once had to contend with Killer Robot doppelgangers of Chris. When questioned on their existance, Chris explains that he needs them for promotion tours, and their murderous habits are self-defense because "Do you have any idea what the average Total Drama fan is like?!"
• In the Wander over Yonder episode "The Legend", Wander and Sylvia befriend a band of kids fleeing one of Lord Dominator's attacks. The kids pass the time traveling to meet up with their parents with a series of stories about "the Hero of Legend", which are actually wildly exaggerated accounts of Wander's escapades. One kid in particular, Melodie, spins a convoluted story about Wander being the last of a race of Star Nomads who has a space princess girlfriend and werewolf powers and who is secretly related to all of his arch-enemies, a playful jab at WOY fan-fiction writers and some popular fan theories regarding Wander's backstory.
• On the website for Rick and Morty's Galactic Federation, Prisoner NE-3679-I is listed as a "Tumblorkian", and they were imprisoned for "Slaaangophilia".
• Star Trek: Lower Decks as a whole is a comedy series that makes fun of a lot of the usual tropes associated with the franchise and audience expectations with them.
  • In the episode "Veritas" the character Clar insists that all members of Starfleet are "the best of the best" and that the commanding officers are "infallible heroes" who prepare their crew for every possible contingency, a belief that is shared by many long time Trekkie fans, to the point where he believes anyone who says otherwise is lying. However, it is explained that this is not the case. The lower deck Ensigns are almost never told what is going on because the officers have more important things to worry about, and sometimes even they don't know what the hell is going on and screw up themselves. However, it is also explained why not being flawless is okay too, because that's why everyone joined Starfleet, to explore the unknown and discover new things they don't know about, even if it means making mistakes along the way.
  • In the episode "Reflections" Mariner and Boimler are sent to a Starfleet recruiting booth at a fair, and a couple passing aliens decide to start antagonizing them over everything between Starfleets' Martial Pacifist credo to them changing uniforms every couple of years, which closely resemble audience criticisms. Boimler eventually explodes on them over the trivial nature of their complaints and that Starfleet doesn't WANT to be a military but are forced to when the time comes, and how nobody respects Starfleet until they save the day.

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