Overshadowed By Controversy Cleanup

For what it's worth, I have seen memes about Twitter users trying to go back to Tumblr after Musk's changes. They usually involve the latter site's userbase half-jokingly trying to fend off the former site's users, which I think might be a reflection of the controversies affecting it.

Wait why does You Tube have an example. Most people just know it as place to watch videos. Like me.

I'd cut the entry.

I also support cutting Kiwifarms, due to it intentionally courting controversy.

Tbh 4chan should go to. That site runs on controversy too.

I agree with that. Looking at the entries, looks like some of those could be used to refer to individual YouTubers, but YouTube as a whole is too popular to be OBC.

I think 4chan might be able to stay, since from what I've heard, it isn't the entire site that's terrible, just some very prominent boards like /b/ that end up defining the site's image.

Kiwi Farms can go because it was basically founded as a cyberstalking site anyway.

I think 4chan would better fit a Common Knowledge entry than a OBC one. For one, there isn't a single controversy that overshadows 4chan as an entire site - the entire site has controversies spread across it, but the bulk of them are on /b/ and on /pol/, which while definitely controversial, are precisely places meant to sort of contain their userbases (so that's two strikes against OBC already).

In this case, Common Knowledge would simply point out that the entire site isn't like /b/ or /pol/, and that acting like an user of them on other boards would either get you banned or make you an outcast among outcasts. And that board culture can range from the elitist to the amicable, and the chaotic to the orderly.

Edited by Remulus on Apr 28th 2024 at 8:04:58 AM

• America's Next Top Model was a rather popular reality show competition that showcased up and coming models who could win a modeling contract and was hosted by supermodel Tyra Banks. While the show still has its defenders, the majority of viewers now look back on the show with a more critical eye with its most infamous moment being when Banks critically berated losing Cycle 4 hopeful Tiffany Richardson for not being as upset about her elimination as she thought she should have been. Additional controversies include several problematic behaviors of both the competitors and the judges, dangerous situations and photo shoots that have actually lead to illness and injury to contestants, rampant Manipulative Editing that portrayed scenarios and people to be worse (or better) than what they truly were and the added revelation that the participants had to sign non-disclosure agreements that would legally bar them from speaking out on the experiences for over a decade, varying levels of success amongst the winners themselves (as a runner-up is usually more likely to be successful, as was the case of Cycle 3's Yaya DaCosta and Cycle 11's Lio Tipton), and questionable makeovers.

I think the "I was rooting for you!" thing a controversial moment (and probably the most everlasting meme from the show, maybe even a Signature Scene — I barely watched ANTM but I knew about this from the gifs), but I don't think it overshadows ANTM as a whole. The other stuff reads like a List of Transgressions that seem to apply to most reality shows. I think ANTM is more remembered by the general public as a product of its time than for any specific controversy — maybe closer to Condemned by History?

EDIT: Actually there's some more Live Action TV examples that feel questionable.

• CN Real was a commercial dud, and you probably don't remember much about the actual shows themselves. You probably do remember the backlash it got for being a block of live-action reality and game shows on Cartoon Network, a channel associated with anything but live action. It doesn't help that the block came out after Out of Jimmy's Head, another ill-regarded attempt by the network to branch out into live action.

This feels like the premise of the block itself was controversial. The reason so few of the shows were remembered is simply because they usually weren't good enough to justify it.

• Discussing any of the live-action The Fairly OddParents! movies (A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!, A Fairly Odd Christmas, and A Fairly Odd Summer) to fans of the series will cause them to start ranting about how they retconned the much beloved Distant Finale ending to Channel Chasers in favor of the future depicted here, which is the main reason why most fans vehemently refuse to acknowledge them as canon.

The retcon is built into the film's premise, and I don't think the films are meant to be canon to the cartoon anyway. Most people just find the films disappointing as a whole, and discussion seems to be more about that rather than specifically Channel Chasers.

• It's hard to talk about The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder, the live-action Sequel Series/reboot to the original series, without mentioning it winning the award for "Favorite Kids TV Show" at Nickelodeon's 2023 Kids Choice Awards, which many people felt was an undeserved win due to the show being met with overwhelmingly negative reception, plus the fact that Fairly Odder was removed from Paramount+ and Nickelodeon's website less than a year after it premiered.

I've never heard about this; all I know is that the show reportedly sucked. I think most adults have agreed the KCAs don't hold much water anyway.

(On Seinfeld)

• The final episode is notorious for being a Clip Show that ends with the main characters imprisoned for not intervening in a crime, after having all their worst aspects laid out in detail. The clip show aspect was made worse by how the original airing of the last episode directly followed another clip show.

The premise itself sounds controversial; there's nothing left to overshadow.

Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 28th 2024 at 12:27:59 PM

There were Windows Movie Maker ANTM parodies for different works (mostly Pokémon) all over YouTube when I was a kid, and I don't remember any of them bringing up the incident, not even for a joke. The closest they got to referencing any controversy was depicting hostility between the contestants; even then, that was common for reality TV at the time. Ergo, at least insofar as its target demographic is concerned, I doubt the incident tainted the show's image in the long term other than it being a shocking moment.

Pretty sure Fairly Odder is more known for being terrible than winning an award after getting delisted.

If the live-action movies are overshadowed by anything it's probably Drake Bell's controversies, and even then he's more overshadowed than the films.

Seinfeld is more like an Audience-Alienating Ending.

Edited by SpongeBat1 on Apr 28th 2024 at 10:53:21 AM

Yeah, all I know about Fairly Odder is that it sucks. It winning awards is just kinda... eh. Like I don't hear about the Kid's Choice Awards at all anymore.

Yeah, and honestly the more notable controversy is the show being removed from streaming not even a year after its release. (which made its KCA win funnier since a show that was not able to be legally watched won) Also kids liking media that adults do not like is common too.

I have moved OvershadowedByControversy.Website to OvershadowedByControversy.Websites and cutlisted the former.

I have also changed the wicks.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 28th 2024 at 5:16:31 AM

For the Kids' Choice Awards bit, I think we should move that to Award Snub.

I’m surprised Ryan O’Neal isn’t included. So this is what I wrote:

• Ryan O'Neal is mostly known for his personal troubles and being a domestic abuser and a horrible personality. He punched his 12 year old Griffin, shot at him in 2009, forced his kids to use drugs at a young age, even hit on his own daughter Tatum at his girlfriend Farrah Fawcett’s funeral (even worse, he even admitted about it to Huffpost), the list goes on and on.

Any changes or anything else I should do before publishing that edit?

Ryan O'Neal was surely extremely controversial, but there is one thing weird about it: Overshadowedby Controversy implies that the creator or movie or whatever had a visible presence in popular culture, and then the controversy happened and that is all that people remember of them.

O'Neal was already very under the radar before the controversies piled up. By the time people started to get really serious about reassessing artists based on their personal lives, O'Neal was already weirdly forgotten. He probably even beats Warren Beatty for the position of "actor that starred in so many important movies in their heyday and now is weirdly invisible."

Edited by renenarciso2 on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:47:11 AM

Yeah, if one thing is giving me pause it's the fact that I'm going "who?" when you're mentioning him. I've somehow not seen a single movie he's been in which, coupled with the most generic name I can imagine, makes me wonder if he's actually in the zeitgeist enough to have any real reputation one way or the other.

He did have a reoccurring part on Bones, which is pretty mainstream for someone who is supposedly controversial. Did this stuff about him come out after his role on the show ended?

I think his role in Bones ended in 2017, just as Me Too! started going strong. My impression is that the wave of reasessing controversial artists sort of missed O'Neal

Pretty sure lot of people did found out because his horrible reputation is all they talked about in social media comment sections when he died five months ago.

...so given the current situation, i'm gonna hold onto Drake's entry just in case.

The entry for Film.Cuties has just been updated a couple of times. Someone added a "do not discuss" warning quoted from 4chan, someone else cut most of it again.

• Overshadowed by Controversy: While it was released in its home country of France without much issue, the American release was tainted by a very misguided release poster, which featured the child actresses in sexualized poses with the implication that the film was not critical of this sexualization. The release of the film, which clarified that this imagery does not make up most of the movie, only led to more controversy over the depiction of children in the film. This led to a massive review-bombing campaign and even legal backlash insisting that Netflix pull the film. To this day, it's very difficult to talk about any other aspect of the film without first addressing the concerns of pedophilia apologism; in fact, some sites like the infamous 4chan actually ban any discussion of the film.

• is it worth keeping the reference to 4chan at all, or should we cut that line?
• The legal backlash mentioned above was thrown out of court as a bad faith prosecution ("knowingly filed charges he knew were not supported by any evidence"). Is that fact worth a link or a mention?

No need to single out 4chan.

I don't know about the second point; it may be worth a mention, but on the other hand, it may just be extra words (the current phrasing to me already implies that nothing came of the legal action).

I don't mind mentioning 4chan as an example here. Restore the previous entry as it has more detail on the scope of the problem. We don't ban talking about this movie regardless of the rules of other sites.

I don't see any need to quote the 4chan warning that was previously there, and definitely not with the Even Evil Has Standards pothole.