Even Super Robot Wars gets in on the joke, where he regularly knocks some badassery into such pilots as Shinji Ikari.
Dozle Zabi only says "Once the Big Zam is mass produced..." once. And it's one of the most memorable lines in the series. Same applies to Ramba Ral's "This is no Zaku, boy! No Zaku!!!"
Char Aznable. One fleeting romance with Lalah Sune, who was about 5 years younger, and an implied relationship with the slightly younger Haman Karn... and you're forever labelled a paedophile. Not helping matters is how he manipulated gullible little Quess Paraya into becoming a willful pawn, but people are apparently ignoring how Char is hardly interested in all the praise Quess heaps on him, not even concerning himself (or even bothering to learn) when she gets blown up by Chan Agi.
Nena Trinity from Mobile Suit Gundam 00 crossed the Moral Event Horizon when she blew up a wedding with her Throne Drei because she was irritated. Then afterwards, things got rather worse for her and she's forced to lay low, be less psychotic, helping Wang Liu Mei. When she mistreats her, Nena starts with leaking information that Liu Mei withheld to the Celestial Being, saving many lives. And when Liu Mei got even worse, Nena snapped again and killed her. While she's definitely a nutcase and generally not caring about other people's lives, she's able to do both good and evil, and she's got a really tragic existence too which, while not absolving her of any crime, does mean she is perfectly able to be pitied. Fans only remembered that one wedding incident and think that's all Nena ever did, thereby she's an unforgivable evil little bitch. Predictably, due to this response, no one feels sorry when Louise Halevy — the Sole Survivor of the wedding incident — brutally kills her, Nena's death being treated blatantly as a case of Asshole Victim as she's never mentioned again after her death.
Gundam Build Fighters produced a humorous example: In Episode 23, Ricardo Fellini's Gundam gets a Luminescent Blush when his girlfriend Kirara's Gerbera Tetra grapples it during an exhibition battle. After the episode aired, animation director Masashi Obari jokingly tweeted "Now I have to live with being the man who made a Gundam blush for the rest of my life..."
Every member of the primary cast in the anime has at least one minor trait or (in)famous moment that ended up being their standard fanfic portrayal. Sadly, this blatantly ignores the Character Development that sees the characters grow out of those attitudes, which in turn results in people savaging the series for having shallow, one-dimensional characters.
At the start of the series Heero is full of self-loathing and tries to atone by putting his life on the line constantly - so much so that an off-hand line of dialog ("Life comes cheap, especially mine") has become a tertiary Catchphrase. He also attempts to kill himself twice early onnote in Episode 1 he tries to activate a self-destruct device in his spacesuit but it misfires, and in Episode 3 he jumps out of a tall building and doesn't pull his parachute cord, but Relena shouting his name somehow convinced him to pull it close to the ground and in one of the show's more memorable moments, he self-destructs the Wing Gundam (to keep it out of OZ's hands) and nearly dies in the process. Shortly after this he undergoes Character Development and starts getting over his self-loathing, to the point where at the climax of the series he defiantly shouts "I WILL NOT DIE!"...but this all tends to get ignored by both fans and detractors, who portray him as suicidal from start to finish.
Because self-destructing comes up prominently several times throughout the show (the five Wing boys and Zechs all attempted it at least once, with varying degrees of success, and The Movie ends with them getting rid of the Gundams once and for all), it's essentially seen as Wing's gimmick, with video games like Super Robot Wars and Gundam Breaker giving the Wing Gundams the ability to self-destruct on command regardless of how useful this actually is in context.
Relena only yelled Heero's name out loud thrice in the series (plus once more in the dub), yet people bash her as if she finished every episode with a Say My Name scream. She's also treated as a Yandere or a Stalker with a Crush despite the fact that she went to visit Heero all of once and remarked about it a few scenes laternote "I've come all the way here just to chase after a guy. Are you surprised, Father? But I couldn't help myself; I wanted to see him so badly. Can you understand how I feel, Father? Heero's the support I need to have around until I can get over my sadness over you. But he keeps running away from me...". (She did track him down a second time, but that was because she was afraid he would try to kill himself and had something she thought would convince him otherwise.)
There are also people who claim that she's constantly being kidnapped and in need of rescue, rather like Orihime later on. Relena was kidnapped all of once in the anime (Endless Waltz), but people also tend to label her imprisonment by Romefeller as a kidnapping, ignoring that it was intentional and had a positive outcome. And late in the series, she's held hostage on the space fortress Libra, but that was a snap decision by the person responsible and done while ignoring the chain of command, rather than orders by White Fang's leader to detain her.
Relena might as well get an award for this, since even the first thing she ever says gets this. In the first episode she asks her father to "leave yourself a little bit of free time" on his business trips, causing some to call her an Attention Whore who demands that he ignore his very important work to spend time with her. This ignores quite a few things, like her father's obvious displeasure with the situation (he isn't happy when the Alliance comes to sweep him off to do more work shortly after they land back on Earth), and the fact that just four episodes later they're on another business trip and Relena handles Minister Darlian's being tied up with work much better.
Wu Fei is possibly the biggest victim of this in all of Wing (yes, even moreso than Relena). In an early episode he denigrates a female opponent, leading people to assume he's a psychopathic misogynist. Late in the series, he takes up the ideal of justice and becomes something of a Jerkass. It's typically ignored that there are reasons for his attitudes (Freudian Excuse, My Greatest Failure, and Values Dissonance from a strict, traditionalist Chinese upbringing), or once again that he gets over it.
Another often-cited complaint with Wu Fei is his hypocrisy, as some say his repeated statements about honor and fair fights conflict with his terroristic actions (like blowing up a dormitory full of sleeping soldiers in his debut episode). However, the show actually presents Wu Fei's internal conflict over his actions, particularly in the episode where Team Mom Sally helps pull him out of his Heroic BSoD.
The big problem with Wu Fei is that a lot of his characterization is centered around the death of his wife and how that affected his worldview. Some of you reading this just went "Wait, what? He had a wife!?" The anime never even mentions Meiran Chang, nor how her death weighs on his mind. This is only revealed in the Episode Zero manga, which goes into the pilots' backstories (it was planned to be in the anime, but got replaced by a Recap Episode due to production issues). With her taken into account, a lot of Wu Fei's more controversial actions take on a new, much more sympathetic light.
Wing even has a non-human example: The Leo mobile suit used early in the series has a reputation all over the internet (even on this Wiki) as being a shoddy piece of crap that falls apart if it's so much as breathed upon. Granted, it is a Mook Mobile that's 15 years old when the show starts, but Leos tend to do quite when not facing a Super Prototype, and going purely by the numbers they're are actually superior to some better-liked Gundam staples like the Zaku II. The main problem is that unlike the Zaku, the Leo never really got the chance to shine and didn't have a dedicated pilot like Char Aznable to show what they could do; the show's Char Aznable Expy Zechs Merquise only gets a couple of battles in his Leo (managing to simply stalemate the Wing Gundam in free-fall) before he pulls the Leos' Super Prototype, the Tallgeese, out of the museum. Not helping is one infamous scene early in the series where a Buster Rifle shot that misses a Leo still causes it to explode...which was almost certainly an animation error.
Quatre did go berserk that one time with the ZERO System, but to hear the Fan Dumb, you'd think that's normal behavior for him. He is often portrayed as mean and evil in fanfiction, even though he is neither. Worth noting, too, is that all the pilots use the ZERO System, and all of them have...issues with it. All, too, overcome them, with the exception of Duo, who lacked both the opportunity and the desire to give ZERO another try. Quatre just went more berserk (blowing up 1/3 of the L2 Colonies) because his father was killed, and worse, they'd had a major argument beforehand and Quatre didn't get to patch things up.
Gundam Wingitself is an example of this, much like Fushigi Yuugi above. Because the show features Bishōnen characters prominentlynote The fact that all seven of the male leads have female counterparts, most of whom are their Love Interests, is conveniently ignored, many anime fans automatically assumed that it was nothing but Yaoi-bait and wrote it off as trash. This impression wasn't aided by the fact that the show attracted a massive Fujoshi fanbase, who tend to produce fanworks that ignore of the "giant robots" and "war between Earth and space" aspects in favor of having the boys fall in love and make out, while the girls either cease to exist or (as is usually the case with poor Relena) go crazy and/or die horribly.
Olba Frost has a great deal of hatedom due to one episode where he became furious at the heroes for hurting his brother. Never mind his big brother got injured taking an attack for him. Never mind they've gone through so much hell that they only have each other for emotional support. Never mind for the rest of the series he's a perfectly calm and composed person. Never mind he wants to redeem himself in the eyes of his brother and stand on his own two feet. Nope, he's a sniveling male Yandere, through and through. Even Olba's own voice actor dislikes the guy because of all this. Which is a shame, as there are other, far more legitimate reasons to dislike him and Shagia.
If you listen to the internet, Lunamaria Hawke couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if she was standing inside it because she missed a shot on a civilian shuttle moving on a relatively predictable course. On the one hand, Episode 7 establishes her as a lousy shot in person when she couldn't get a bullseye at the shooting range. On the other, her ZAKU Warrior's weapon is a long-range beam cannon...
Also, she wasn't the only person to have missed the shuttle in other Gundam shows; in an episode of Zeta Gundam, Char tried to shoot down a fleeing shuttle (carrying Jamitov), but he missed as well. Also, in the Destiny manga adaptation, Shinn, Kira, and Athrun tried to shoot down a shuttle and missed as badly.
Even Kira Yamato isn't immune. Fans seem to have clung to the idea that he's actually a poor pilot that relies on Freedom's Beam Spam abilities and only sits in the corner letting his computer do all the work. This was only true in his first battle with Freedom, in which he does indeed use Full-Burst Mode for almost the entire fight, but that's understandable because he's getting the hang of it, and the show wanted to hammer "THIS IS FREEDOM'S GIMMICK! IT HAS MANY GUNS!" into the audience. But after that he mostly sticks to sabers and his one rifle (which doesn't use the targeting computer) and in fact moves around in battle quite a bit. He never uses his Beam Spam more than once or twice per battle after that, yet the fandom seems only remember him sitting in one spot and letting his computer do all the work for the rest of SEED and all of Destiny. Of course, this probably wasn't aided by the copious use of Freedom's Full Burst Attack via Stock Footage.
This is also in part because in the first part of the series, Kira pulled some tricks with the Strike Gundam that even detractors will call clever. After he gets the Freedom, this pretty much disappears in favor of the aforementioned "beat viewers over the head with the fact that Freedom has lots of guns".
Athrun has also gained a measure of infamy because he self-destructed both his suits in the first series. You'd think he blew himself up more times than he did enemy mobile suits.
Fan Dumb, you'd think that's normal behavior for him. He is often portrayed as mean and evil in fanfiction, even though he is neither. Worth noting, too, is that all the pilots use the ZERO System, and all of them have...issues with it. All, too, overcome them, with the exception of Duo, who lacked both the opportunity and the desire to give ZERO another try. Quatre just went more berserk (blowing up 1/3 of the L2 Colonies) because his father was killed, and worse, they'd had a major argument beforehand and Quatre didn't get to patch things up.