Troubled Production / Other Media

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The season Mighty Little Defenders had a troubled development for half a year. The National Radio and Television Administration forced Creative Power Entertaining to edit the fighting scenes to make them more suitable for kids. They also forced CPE to change the weapons. This caused the season to come out much later than expected.

Fan Works

• Unwilling Service, a Pokémon fanfic series currently spanning three simultaneous fics, barely managed to see four chapters between 2011-14 before author Economy (formerly McKnight and then SeaRover1986) declared it dead. He revived it in May 2016, to take his focus off of another project that wasn't going anywhere, but while he managed to put out a chapter for each of the three fics in quick succession, his beta-writer, someone referring to himself as Jake, encountered one problem after another, especially in light of a burglary in October that year, which required him to move back in with his family and endure a hectic lifestyle. Economy continued to hold out on him until he caved in and revealed how he really felt about the story. Things didn't fare much better when the author took to Upwork, and the resulting frustration led to increasing animosity between him and Jake, whom he had also been friends with for over a decade; most people who proposed to take it up either failed to understand what he expected of them (even after getting Jake to summarize what he did before), went silent, had to back out, or lost interest by the time he got back to them after putting them on hold in favor of those before them. This spanned three attempts before he pulled the plug early in last said attempt and even wrote something on his blog that he retracted upon being called out, but which still led their friendship into a bitter multi-month decline. Even the two and only freelancers who actually did follow through with a chapter or so eventually stopped responding to his messages, leading him to Freelancer instead when he posted the project one last time on Upwork, contacted multiple other Freelancers recommended to him, and had the project taken down for content violations. Economy later considered just to commissioning outright for an initial draft of the whole story instead, should he ever decide to come back to the project itself^note and that wasn't a decision he made lightly; originally, he planned for the project to be some kind of personal game for himself, especially regarding his plans for the Pal Park and both of the Battle Frontiers, having once loved the actual games but since realizing one thing after another about them that rubbed him the wrong way, but would abandon writing altogether late in 2020, having found better pursuits after finding himself simply not cut out for it (see point #3 here).
  • Jamie (now Jimmy) having muscles sparked a major dispute towards the end of 2012. Economy asked Jake at least three times not to buff him up, which he ignored as he proceeded just to do things his way and then tell him to redo the relevant scenes himself. He did redo some of them after being called out for his disobedience, but not before justifying himself first and arguing with him, and even then, there were still some things left that only muscles could explain (which he only managed to get rid of years later by having someone else do the whole chapter over). Eventually, this was one of the few things he cited when asked multiple times to cite what he came to hate about the story itself.
  • There is also the issue of the PokeWalker, one of Economy's favorite aspects of a pair of games that Jake very outright hates to this day.
  • As for the two authors' relationship, it's been dead in the water since February 2018. While Jake's bailout marked the beginning of the end between them, actual tensions began when Economy stated a refusal to help him with any of his fanfiction until he deliver a make-up assignment of some sort. It was not long after that Economy got some answers out of Jake regarding what he actually hated about the story, but even when he offered concessions on two such aspects, things went nowhere from there in terms of winning him back, which led Economy to believe that he just wanted to be catered to and to do whatever he'd damn well please and was now being a poor sport over not having had his way through and through to begin with. Soon thereafter, Economy offered Jake a break from it all, but then impulsively demanded more answers about the situation, going on to tell him on his blog to go fuck himself when he thought he was ignoring him, before he revealed he was actually on a family trip and decided right then and there that that was it. Starting with a botched apology in response, things went on and off for months, and seemed to take a better turn for their friendship itself when Economy offered at least not to talk about his fetishes or a certain show Jake also hates, before deciding to let more time go by before he'd express his actual issues outside of but related to Jake's departure. Only a month went by as Economy proceeded to elaborate in a WordPad file meant for much later on, before he broke down and expressed the toll such a thing was taking on his mental health, at which point Jake urged him, more out of guilt and despair than frustration, just to forget about him altogether.
    • And to begin with, as Economy went on to post onto his blog:
    What I wanted to make sense of, was why he requested all kinds of stuff to make happen in Unwilling Service if he actually hated it so much. He wanted Mewtwo to Mega Evolve a certain way (can't remember between his X or Y forms), he wanted Dawn to try being a nudist like the protagonists and to participate in the Pal Park, he wanted Jamie to be naked upon meeting each of the Pokemon Idols, and even when he admitted his lack of interest in gym quests, he still went on to suggest ways to make it more interesting, asked to see my first entry about the story, requested a trial run of the Pal Park, and asked that each of the mains have a rival to compete against for that event. All of that, on top of requesting that I go through my blog to tag each entry where I talked about Pokemon, mentioning someone who found the premise amusing, sharing certain things with me like that tabletop game and something about parallel universes, and before I previously abandoned it, asking me to find it within me to care about it again. He even said yes when I asked if he'd ever be interested in a hypothetical visual adaptation of some sort. That's what I mean when I talk about any interest he displayed up until telling me he can't do it anymore, not just because of his lifestyle, but because he couldn't stand all the halfway measures we had to make. Can you say, "two-faced hypocrisy?"
• The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum ran into this problem in 2016 and the first half of 2017. The main driving cause was Creative Differences, with the co-authors (specifically VoxAdam, Sledge115, and JedR) clashing with the head writer Redskin122004 over the direction of the story and characterizations. The main points of contention stemmed from the depiction of Queen Chrysalis^note Red wanted to portray her as a more sympathetic Well-Intentioned Extremist whereas Vox and Sledge wrote her closer to being a Card-Carrying Villain who was only pulling an Enemy Mine for the sake of self-preservation, the fate of Queen Celestia^note Red planned to have her be eaten by Tirek as the stepping stone to the final climactic battle of the story; Vox, however, found the plan to be callous, especially since Celestia had clearly been brainwashed and corrupted by Tirek, and tried to write in a scene where Luna expressed the desire to save her, only for Red to express the belief the sentiment was a waste, and an incident in which the story's protagonist Marcus would've been forced to shoot a pregnant woman in the heat of battle^note Jed explained he and the other writers were fine with the deed itself but did not like how Red had no intention of having Marcus face any sort of blowback or consequences for this action. These creative disagreements soon spilled over into becoming personal disagreements, with every member of the team recalling the 2016 period as a deeply stressful and difficult time. These issues came to a head in May 2017, where an explosive argument between Red and the other writers over the direction of the last story arc culminated with both sides deciding they had enough and threw in the towel, with an acrimonious split to top it off. Since then, Red took a long break from writing to collect his thoughts (as much of his behavior at the time had been caused by an especially severe case of Creator Breakdown) and ultimately left Fimfiction permanently to focus on other non-MLP projects while the other writers decided to launch a Continuity Reboot titled SPECTRUM and start over fresh.
• The Pony POV Series ran into similar problems, due to the sheer size and scope of this fic, combined with issues in outsourcing for the G2 Dreams/Nightmares arc. Specifically, head writer Alex Warlorn and co-writer LZ0291's friendship became heavily strained over the years due to Creative Differences, leading to disagreements between the two that ultimately caused the Shining Armor Arc to be frozen in Development Hell for a time. On top of this, LZ developed clinical depression at some point in production (which certainly didn't help his deteriorating relationship with Alex). The fighting between the two led to another co-writer, Kendell2 temporarily departing from the project, as he didn't want to get caught up in the drama and be forced to choose sides. Although Alex and LZ did come to a truce in order to finish the Shining Armor Arc, LZ ultimately decided to leave as the fic and his strained relationship with Alex was causing him too much stress, leaving only Alex to finish the fic.
• The Q&A session for the 100th episode reveals that despite the co-authors actually getting along, the very first episode of The Pokémon Squad was affected badly by this. Neither Sailor Pikachu nor Rayquaza Master knew what to do with each other's writing, and so they ad-libbed it. As a result, it became such a garbled mess that they both disowned the final product and declared it non-canon.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted third edition has had certain issues. In particular, delays due to attempting to get a robust foundation for everything in place were aggravated by one of the writers leaving the team and a developer suffering from persistent health issues. Editing on the corebook also took an extremely long time. The net result was that the finished core product of a kickstarter from 2013 took until 2017 to be sent out to backers. In addition, the developer with health issues had to deal with further problems in his life, resulting in him and the other developer leaving the game and a new developer team taking over.
• Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine ran into issues with the publisher, Eos Press. While the product itself was released fairly swiftly in the delay-ridden environment of tabletop publishing, the printed hard copies from Eos Press never materialised, with the printing money having apparently been taken and spent on other projects; a print-on-demand run for backers was eventually funded by an extremely generous supporter. "Eos" has since become a low-key curse word among kickstarter backers, and the game's author, Jenna Moran, has essentially cut ties with them.
• Nobilis, also by Jenna Moran, has faced this two editions running. Second edition became one of those rarely seen legends among the public because when the first publisher dissolved, the responsibility of printing fell to Guardians of Order, which decided to stop sending them out and, in Moran's own words, "lie curled like a serpent around the dark heart of the world". Fast-forward a few years to third edition, and there were considerable delays late in the process when it turned out one of the artists had been tracing Touhou Project fanart, forcing swift and ad-hoc replacement that left the final product somewhat disjointed aesthetically.

Toys

• Transformers: Alternators, though one of the most well-regarded lines of its era among the fandom, seemed borderline cursed in terms of its development. The concept of the line—high-end licensed car models that turn into classic Transformers characters—was both a slam dunk in terms of fandom appeal, and a difficult minefield to cross.
  • Alternators was in a 1/24 scale. This made its figures abnormally large and expensive, and when combined with a slow release schedule, it created issues of stores over-ordering on certain waves and ending up with entire boxes filled with a single character that ended up selling poorly. This created an odd feast-or-famine cycle, where stores would either have too much of a given character, or not enough—attempting to address this problem by shipping more of the hard-to-find characters would suddenly cause them to start clogging shelves. Between this and several other factors, Alternators was a consistent sales struggler, despite wide acclaim from the fanbase.
  • Due to needing to negotiate licenses with car manufacturers, several planned toys were ditched, mostly because their companies didn't want their cars associated with "war toys", or thought that the idea of the cars turning into robots would result in them looking broken. This included Porsche (which forced Jazz to change altmodes to a Mazda) and Volkswagen (which meant Bumblebee never appeared in the line). One stranger problem was the Windcharger toy, which ended up getting its rifle weapon gutted at Honda's request, leaving it with a rather puny-looking "shield." Additionally, because Hasbro only secured the toy rights, they could not make fiction based on Alternators, meaning the line would live and die off nostalgic fan support.
  • Part of the idea behind the line was that since these were model cars, they should have all the traits of model cars, such as movable steering or opening doors, trunks, and hoods. In the case of opening doors, this meant that every single figure in the line needed to have a full-fledged interior, which resulted in their transformations being unusually complex to accommodate this.
  • Many of the trademarks on existing characters hadn't been used since the 80s, which meant that they were snapped up by other companies, or were considered indefensible due to being too short and basic. This led to a number of characters either receiving name changes (Bluestreak to Silverstreak, Shockwave to Shockblast, Overdrive to Windcharger) or having "Autobot" clumsily stuck onto the front of their names (Autobot Hound, Autobot Tracks, Autobot Skids).
  • About half the toys in the line were not intended to have the names they ended up with when they were first designed. Part of this was the aforementioned trademark difficulties, but another part of it was their attempt to answer criticisms that the line had no Decepticon figures (since there aren't a lot of Decepticon cars). Among other things, this meant that Sunstreaker was first released as Dead End, Trailbreaker was only released as Swindle, Tracks and Jazz were given rather incongruous remolds as Ravage and Shockblast, and Windcharger was given a yellow-and-black Palette Swap and released under the name "Decepticharge", a name that seems to have been a Permanent Placeholder. Even aside from this problem, the Side Swipe figure was intended to be Tracks, the Prowl figure was intended to be Red Alert, and the Optimus Prime figure was intended to be someone else entirely. In nearly all of the above cases, this led to the toys looking almost nothing like the characters they were actually released as, barring head design and colors.
  • Though the line saw something of an upgrade in its Japanese release, Binaltech, with metal parts, more paint, and short stories that came with the figures, it ultimately sputtered out there. This caused Takara to try to rework it as a collector-aimed series with associated fiction—and said fiction became Transformers: Kiss Players, generally held to be some of the worst fiction the franchise ever saw.

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