Most Vicious Fandom Wars

[Khan]

 

I'd rather not.

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Oh, God.  That might have been the first time someone, or someones, broke the Internet.

 

Seriously, we needed a Mathew Brady-type figure to go around and take photos of the carnage.

 

Yep.  Crassiebella.

 

It was.  When GL tried to pair Danny with Cassie and Michelle with either Bill or Tony (can't remember which anymore, but they definitely tried with both), the reactions from "the Mannyacs" was so intense that TPTB ultimately realized what the non-Manny fans had been saying all along: that separating Danny and Michelle was more trouble than it was worth.

 

Honestly, as miserable as I was to see Michelle Bauer off the canvas (well, not really, since I was never a fan of Nancy St. Alban's), because losing another Bauer was the last thing the show needed at that point, I was just as miserable watching the Mannyacs essentially hold the show hostage.

 

Unfortunately, just as Danny and Michelle were being phased out, Gus and Harley were pushed to the forefront; and "the GusHers," as it turned out, were no better than the Mannyacs.  In fact, they were worse, because while the average Mannyac was looney tunes and more an object of ridicule than anything else (save for the TRULY scary ones who either created or condoned "Crassiebella"), the average GusHer was downright nasty to anyone who didn't climb aboard the Gus/Harley train.  (And for God's sake, NEVER mention the names "Phillip Spaulding" or "Grant Aleksander" around some of 'em, lest you want your head blown off.)

[Khan]

 

Here's what I never understood about the Mannyacs: under "normal" circumstances, recasting one-half of a popular couple usually results in some fluctuation in fans' support.  Sometimes up, but usually down.  Yet, when Joie (Bethany Joy) Lenz left, and GL recast Michelle with Nancy St. Alban, fan support barely wavered.  Even though it was apparent to just about anyone (who was rational and clear-headed) that Paul Anthony Stewart's chemistry w/ NSA was different from his chemistry w/ Lenz.

 

Did these fans not even NOTICE the change in actresses?  To me, it was as if they were more in love w/ PAS/Danny, or with the IDEA of him with Michelle, than they actually were w/ him and either actress.

 

Of course, what MIGHT have helped was NSA herself.  Long before there was Y&R's Daniel Goddard, there NSA and her shamelessly playing up to fans, encouraging them to root for Manny over all else.

[ChitHappens]

^NSA!  My God!  I remember Michelle lost her memory and turned into this sex kitten all men found difficult to resist. Ugh!  The memories are traumatizing!  

[Khan]

 

They really pulled out all the stops, trying to find some way to make a permanent Danny/Michelle breakup palatable for the audience.

 

The lowest, though, had to be when Roger's death, which was supposed to right a terrible wrong (in not allowing Michael Zaslow to spend the rest of his days with the show) and provide closure to Holly and Blake, somehow became all about Michelle sucking some kind of poison out of Tony's bare chest.  (I am so not making that up.)

 

I'll never forgive DAYS (and specifically, JER) for making John & Marlena the "endgame" over Roman & Marlena, if only because I felt they manipulated the situation by making Wayne Northrop's Roman such a bore, and a far cry from the kind of guy he USED to be, that you had no choice BUT to root for John and Marlena to reunite.

 

If they had conceived a proper love triangle -- meaning, a triangle where neither guy was [!@#$%^&*] upon by the writers in order to prop up the other one -- and it had turned out that John was the better suitor for Doc, that's one thing.  (If nothing else, they could have given us a quadrangle, with a second female who could have been a new love interest for Roman.)  But DAYS (or, rather, JER) went into the triangle with his mind made up already, and then worked on the audience to reach the same conclusion, rather than the other way around.

 

It was just dirty.

[ReddFoxx]

The hate for the Ford Family on OLTL was pretty strong from across the viewership, but some people took it to a crazy level. I recall someone posting photos telling the actors that they should go do porn and being incredibly hateful over all. Those characters were awful but attacking the actors was wrong.

 

[Wendy]

 

As an admitted Scrubs fan, I don't think this is 100% true. If just because he released a video for the recent GH Fan Club Weekend since he couldn't make it. And he was positively still gushing about Patrick likely still being married to Robin and how he loved her, etc. He had no reason to not be honest now. He and KMc were good pals, so... He was always gung ho for them - from Leyla onward.

 

And really, he had nothing to play under Ron except to either be in a tug of war with Britt/Sabrina from their first day (horrible writing since no one knew them from Adam) or stuck on a 5-minute drug addiction that JT was told the character had not by the script but from someone just before filming.

 

Say what you will about Guza - and Lord knows I have - but his team actually developed Patrick and his relationship with Noah well, as well as Patrick and Robin. Probably the last time that character development was done with any care. Once Ron Carlivati came on with his crew, it was game over for a lot of the characters then.

 

And Patrick playing doting daddy to Emma or as a prince for Sabrina/stable good guy versus mobbie Jason for Sam was all he was going to get, even when he was supposedly paired with Sam, playing yes man. Do you really think Patrick stood a chance against Jason?

 

So I think JT saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out while the getting was good.

[Vee]

Jason Thompson was clearly miserable in his last years at GH - he was on autopilot and was very obviously unhappy in 2013 especially. Patrick was not written for - he and most GH/non-OLTL men (Dante, etc.) were expendable plot pieces for Frank and Ron with no minds of their own. So I never begrudged JT that misery or him keeping his stable job. But there were definitely Scrubs fans who seemed to actively resent him staying with the show with Kimberly gone and that is insane on their part. That being said, the Sabrina, etc. stories sucked and he was also clearly not in a good place with it.

[Wendy]

I think the issue with some Scrubs fans was the way these new romances were attempted to be started while Ron was actively having Robin tortured, etc. If she was just presumed dead and showed up later, I think setting up Patrick with someone new - provided he wasn't just "good guy inserted in with a Ron pet" - could have worked.

 

But showing Robin that way - and then having one of her torturers (Dr. O) actually not pay and work at GH, I think it was over for Patrick right then and there as far as hoping to move him on.

 

And let's be real about Sabrina. Ron was gushing about her in the soap mags and how everyone would love her before she even aired. And the romance with Patrick also hinged on using Robin's "memory" so Sabrina could score points with her crush by helping revive the Nurse's Ball, etc.

 

Basically, RC was showing how NOT to move half of a popular couple on without the other half. Just my take.

[marceline]

I remember the Jesse/Angie/David fan war during Prospect Park's AMC reboot.

 

(I'm kidding. It was just me fighting with some poster named Linda in the episode threads. 

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 )

 

But I have to admit that I really loved the fact that an 40+ woman of color was being fought over by two men. It was the exact opposite of the triangles soaps had been giving us for years.

[Vee]

The Patrick/Sabrina romance was horrible. I am in no way disputing that. I adore Robin, I like Scrubs and I had all the same complaints about how they moved Patrick on that Wendy has indicated. But I still don't think the crazier Scrubs fans had a right to blame JT for staying on the show. And as for the fictional characters, literally, some of them still hate everyone in Robin's family (Emma, Anna, etc.) for having a life when she wasn't around. It's nuts.

 

I loved the David/Angie/Jesse triangle, a lot.

[marceline]

 

I remember. AMC 2.0 forced me to get comfortable writing the words, "I agree with Vee...". 

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[Vee]

We were doing it well before they aired too, and man that was unnerving.

 

We both had very strong feelings about the John and Todd wars (and now, if I were to bring back OLTL today, I'd just kill Todd off - he has no place on a soap post-#metoo, at least not for a very long time). But regardless of my feelings about the writing for Evangeline I always felt Renee Elise Goldsberry was a beautiful and talented woman poorly served by a badly written role, and I abhorred the racist attacks on REG. (Though I also didn't see all of them - I was not an active part of the Jolie fanbase, as I completely gave up on John in 2004 and grew to despise him; I wanted better for Natalie.)

 

marceline and I have discussed this privately so it's retreading old ground, but I did want to mention it anyway. What I didn't fully appreciate at that time with Evangeline - due to having naively taken for granted OLTL and ABC's then-slightly-better history with black characters up to that point in the mid-2000s - was just how revolutionary it was for a black female to be caught between several key leading men in frontburner story. I felt they could have better story and characters in those roles, but that isn't the takeaway today. The fact is a black female-led triangle is still a shocking image for American daytime, probably even more today sadly than in 2005. They didn't dare let Hillary on Y&R get between the white men; they killed her first. GH has next to no black canvas to speak of, and OLTL purged theirs a few years after unnecessarily killing Evangeline, which I always thought was a mistake.

 

For me what I take away from the ugly, awful fan wars over those men is more that shining moment in time - however badly written and characterized I felt it was. It was an accident of rewrites that made it happen, but it did happen. It has never come again on ABC or American network soaps, and it probably won't.

[carolineg]

 

I remember that Jate situation.  I have seen the 'chat' that LK and DH did together and it does sort of throw J&M as a pairing under the bus, but the fans went nuts and I heard that Deidre and Drake had a huge falling out over it too, but have long since gotten over it.  Deidre/Marlena's diehard fans are still salty about it.  Tbh, Drake should have known where his bread was buttered and it's not with Lauren Koslow/Kate/or Jate.  I am not gonna lie I found it funny how mad it made everyone though.

 

 

What's funny about the 'NOL' people is they ending up turning on Tamara Braun lol when she supported the Alcazar/Carly pairing.  And I believe they made a serious effort for Ted King to lose his job.  It's been so long now, but I remember the person who ran that board had a lot of legit spoilers and they were a large faction for a few years.  I remember Johnny the bodyguard.  Didn't he get shot and die?

 

Anyway, what I find the most creepy is the fans that make up weird rumors about actors hooking up in real life.  Like Steve Burton is the father of one of Becky Herbst kids.  That's a rumor I have heard over and over.  Plus, there is always the one about Deidre and Drake having a love affair-some believe to this day.  It's really weird to project acting a romance into real life people with literally no proof.

[DRW50]

 

This is so commonplace now, sadly (and scarily), especially with primetime shows. And it so often extends into hating the wives or husbands of the actors as well. One show I watched, someone wrote a fan fiction where the actors killed each other's wives. I was horrified (and the fic site wouldn't take it down - I don't know if they ever did).

[Vee]

I remember hearing that Deidre allegedly whipped fans into a frenzy at an event over John and Kate. It all just sounded insane.