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[Veelk]

Since I'm doing the Naruto reread.....Naruto.

The problem was that it was a very slow destruction, so you can't pinpoint the exact moment it became irrecoverable. In fact, I'd say it started as early with the different direction that the story took after the Mist arc. The Mist established the Naruto world as a special kind of brutal, and after that it became more traditional shonen. And you thought it just put the darkness present in the Mist arc aside for later, you thought it was showing variety, and the content was still good, so no big deal. But reading it now, knowing how it all turns out, the Mist arc is still really good, but it set up some promises that Kishimoto didn't deliver on. But like I said, the stuff afterwards was still good, and then it slowly....slowly started to fall apart. Until you realize how many character assassinations have taken place, how stupid the plot has turned, how many retcons have begun to take place.

Naruto is the worst manga I know of for that reason. It's not objectively the least proficiently written, but....it's the worst.

 

[HotHamBoy]

He didn't ruin it, but the new Ren and Stimpy episodes were something else.

It didn't have an effect on the lore of Ren and Stimpy, though. R&S is like, not even lore-bound. It has no continuity.

But those were pretty fucking bad. John K. is the perfect example of a guy who needs an editor. Someone to reign them in, hold them to deadlines and budgets, not give in to every self-indulgence.

That said, Adult Cartoon Party is funnier than post-Season 2 original R&S.

 

[m_dorian]

George Lukas's flawed vision for the Prequels.
The writers of Lost. They made up things without having any direction with their only goal to create mystery and speculation.
BSG. More or less the same as above but they had better moments.
Mac Walters-Casey Hudson. Speculation from everyone.
Philip Pullman. His Dark Materials. Disappointing third book.

 

[Tawpgun]

Yup and I also thought the introduction of spartan 4's ruined a lot of the mystique and importance of the Master Chief.

I don't mind Spartan IV's as a concept. Seems like a natural evolution of the program, makes sense etc etc.

Spartan II's will always be the GOAT due to better combat training and experience. Dunno what official word is on the difference between the strength/reaction time/speed of in armor IV's vs in armor II's.

My issue is that Master Chief encounters these new spartans and doesn't even acknowledge them. Hell, Laskey and company barely acknowledged finding a thought to be dead, missing for years war hero.

 

[Mighty Chin]

Frank Miller The Dark Knight.

 

[Linkark07]

In videogames, Chris Metzen easily. Dude never wrote anything interesting post WC3 (some could say Vanilla WoW lore was interesting but I disagree). It can be noticed in BC when he started ruining beloved WC3 characters like Illidan or Kael. And then it gets worse. Same with SC2. After WoL, any hope I had for an interesting story disappeared. Overmind is good, Kerrigan was mind controlled, Amon is an ancient being who wants to destroy everything. Boring and cliche.

Manga and anime, I would say Kubo and Bleach. After SS arc, everything started getting from bad to worse. And then the quincies and their boring and OP king appeared. Although in his defense, just like Toriyama, Kubo wanted to stop Bleach after SS. But that isnt a complete excuse, post Namek DB was still great.

 

[TheGameshark]

My issue is that Master Chief encounters these new spartans and doesn't even acknowledge them. Hell, Laskey and company barely acknowledged finding a thought to be dead, missing for years war hero.

Yeah the way he gets treated by the UNSC in that game is annoying. I wanted to punch my screen when Del Rio started speaking chief.

 

[Sanjuro]

Ren & Stimpy were always shit, the guy is a genius animator, but R&S was always bad, stupid gross out humor and i remember being the only cartoon i ever felt like "wow, i have outgrown this".

I'm sorry.

 

[SOLDIER]

Definitely Akira Toriyama. Super Saiyan God? Super saiyan God super saiyan? Tingly feeling? Gtfo with that

I can forgive a lot of that as it's clearly self-parody (something the original series did plenty of times).

But stuff like Bardock being sent back in time so he could be the first Super Saiyan ever?

Fuck that.

 

[SOLDIER]

Has Spider Man ever really recovered since The Clone Saga?

At this point I'm convinced there have been more bad Spider-Man stories than good.

 

[Accoun]

I'm sure there are more examples than this one, but there's Yoshihiro Togashi, creator of YuYu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter.

Ohba and Obata - It's hard to compare because Death Note was like one of the biggest things ever in its time, but wasn't Bakuman also really successful? Of course CLAMP would probably count too (although that's a whole group). Rumiko Takahashi too? I think both Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2 were very popular.

 

[CloudWolf]

It has to be Ridley Scott. At least George Lucas didn't actively contradict his other films, he just added stupid stuff. Ridley Scott just goes out of his way to undo everything that made Alien cool.

Also, special mention goes to Bethesda Game Studios. They are constantly "altering" the Elder Scrolls lore to make things easier to develop.

Pre-Oblivion: "Cyrodill is a lush jungle inhabited by two very different societies of people!"
Post-Oblivion: "Oh wait, no it isn't, it's ordinary medieval Europe and the Imperials are all the same."

Pre-Dawnguard: "Skyrim has an ancient Vampire breed that lives under the ice and drags unsuspecting travelers underwater!"
Post-Dawnguard: "Oh wait, no that's wrong, they are actually just ordinary vampires who can change into some sort of beast."

And as if that isn't enough, they fuck up the Fallout lore more and more with every new game in the series they release, to the point that one of the major plot points in Fallout 2 was completely undone by Fallout 4 because suddenly Jet has been around since before the war.

For me it's has to be the Dexter creator, can't remember his name. Things just kept getting crazy. It was okay then it went off a cliff. Much like the t.v. series.

Those books are insane. I checked out when the Dark Passenger was revealed to literally be some ancient God of Death who has been around since the creation of the world. I'm also pretty sure that at some point it had actual vampires. The depths the show sank to don't come close to the absurdity that are the Dexter books.

 

[YourMaster]

All the talk of Diablo 3 is interesting to me, since I've played it but none of the other games. I just figured the story was supposed to be shit, threw on music, and rampaged to my heart's content while not listening to anyone talk. Fuck me was that bad dialogue.

Part 3 is so much worse it is unbelievable, and it shits on what came before. Playing Diablo 3 felt like watching 'Inspector gadget', where I just kept winning and the demon on duty just kept saying 'I'll get you next time'.

The entire questing format also ruined much of the gameplay, and this was integral with the story telling. In D2 the towns in the acts truly functioned as hubs, as your home base from which you slowly explored the land and completed quests. You discovered not only stuff that helped you with one of your quest, but with this you also gained new information, additional lore or story. You where fighting to accomplish something, not knowing exactly where to go. In D3 you mostly just follow the arrow of the quest marker and the story was a thin layer of crap on top.

It's not high art or anything (aside from the cinematics, as others have mentioned, which were really best-in-show for their time), but it was solid dark fantasy/high school notebook heavy metal with good presentation.

And I disagree with this, D2 storytelling was high art and the epitome of storytelling in games. The cutscenes are nice on their own, but they have a lot more impact in combination with the actual game,... you're on a quest to stop Diablo, but every time you only find the aftermath of what took place. At which point you learn what happened before through the cut scene. For example when you try to stop Baal from being released you find an empty tomb and the remnants of an epic - but lost - fight. You could have made a difference, you're still a step behind. This works because even though you win every fight, you don't actually feel like you're winning until you actually complete the game. Before the expansion you could even say you've lost it all. Compare this to D3 where you destroy everything and they just have to pretend it all doesn't matter.
But there's a whole layer below the surface, with plot twists, where you find out how long the prime evils had been planning all of this, with the faked defeat against the lesser evils and the corruptible soul-stones, which you can only piece together in full if you want to know it and talk to the NPC's to hear the dialogue they don't try to push.

And it's a real shame too about D3 - because D2 set up a very interesting way to continue the story, with Tyreal destroying the world stone after it was corrupted. If there's ever a D4, I hope they just pretend D3 never happened and continue from 2. (With the same dev team as well).

 

[WhiteRabbitEXE]

Probably Ridley Scott with the Alien Lore.

I mean, Alien lore was fucked to hell ages before he made his return to the franchise.

 

[Anticol]

I shouldn't say all Blizzard fans, but when he retired I saw an absolute ton of posts talking about how much he'll be missed and how important he was, etc. His newfound power in 06 or whenever was the worst thing that's ever happened to the company.

If you post this in the games forum you will see the large amount people who will call us crazy for thinking that guy ruined the story of all three games series.

 

[psyfi]

343 is doing a number on the Halo story.

 

[Nekofrog]

He didn't ruin it, but the new Ren and Stimpy episodes were something else.

Yeah, just an instance where a creator didn't understand why his creation got popular or just didn't care and made what he wanted to make. I don't know if he was even trying to entertain anyone but himself

 

[Coriolanus]

And I disagree with this, D2 storytelling was high art and the epitome of storytelling in games. The cutscenes are nice on their own, but they have a lot more impact in combination with the actual game,... you're on a quest to stop Diablo, but every time you only find the aftermath of what took place. At which point you learn what happened before through the cut scene. For example when you try to stop Baal from being released you find an empty tomb and the remnants of an epic - but lost - fight. You could have made a difference, you're still a step behind. This works because even though you win every fight, you don't actually feel like you're winning until you actually complete the game. Before the expansion you could even say you've lost it all. Compare this to D3 where you destroy everything and they just have to pretend it all doesn't matter.
But there's a whole layer below the surface, with plot twists, where you find out how long the prime evils had been planning all of this, with the faked defeat against the lesser evils and the corruptible soul-stones, which you can only piece together in full if you want to know it and talk to the NPC's to hear the dialogue they don't try to push.

And it's a real shame too about D3 - because D2 set up a very interesting way to continue the story, with Tyreal destroying the world stone after it was corrupted. If there's ever a D4, I hope they just pretend D3 never happened and continue from 2. (With the same dev team as well).

Hmm, thematically you're spot on. The lesson that both d1 and d2 were hammering home was clearly that this was an evil that could not be destroyed, and the best you could hope for was to briefly contain it at immense cost. Then d3 comes and... yeah. Saturday morning cartoon all the way.

Ironically the brazilian dub capitalized on this and legit hired VA's that usually do saturday morning cartoons, so it was a wonderful fit, what with them jettisoning any pretense of seriousness from the narrative.

 

[Fercho]

Hideo Kojima fucked the Metal Gear series on MGS4 and never recovered. Maybe he just didn't have to balls to continue developing the themes of MGS2, or the talent. Maybe it was presure from Konami, or the gamers or the press. He runned out of ideas , I don't know.

Used to love the lore know I can't stand it.

 

[Enduin]

i mean i think zenkai boosts in the frieza saga already kind of ruined the concept of the fighting and relative power levels but yeah....stuff got pretty wacky

True there were issues back then. Really the Saiyan saga truly opened Pandora's Box so to speak but even Zenkai boosts had a drawback with the whole brink of death thing to really maximize its effectiveness, but even then it was wholly inconsistent in its depiction. Kao-Ken was similar in that it took a drastic toll on the person's body. Both had distinct disadvantages. There were ways Zenkai could have been effectively limited in how big an impact it could have on the overall series. But that kind of became pointless with everyone becoming SSJs during Cell.

Trunks and the start of the Android Saga though was the true point of no return to me. That entire sequence blew things wide open in a way nothing else had previously.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

George Lucas by a country mile. He was never a good writer at all, all of his story ideas for Star Wars eventually got overruled, and then, when Star Wars became a mega-hit, they allowed him to do whatever he wanted.

 

[DrSlek]

I'm sure a lot of people are going to think of George "Midichlorians" Lucas, but my answer is going to be Chris Metzen and the lore of Warcraft.

The mess of lore rewrites, retcons, and poorly constructed stories to facilitate WoW's ever expanding playable world did a number on the Warcraft world players had come to love. I completely checked out when the Dranei were reintroduced, rewritten, with trandimensional space ships whose technology the blood elves stole.

Yeah, Warcraft is an irredeemable mess nowadays.

Probably Ridley Scott with the Alien Lore.

Close second place to Warcraft.

 

[Narroo]

Unfortunately Akira Toriyama and Dragon Ball. Though much of it due to editor/publisher pressure and his failing interest. But ultimately he should have shut shit down and not just kept dragging things out post Frieza. It's not always easy to know when to stop.

Oh lord, the Android/Cell saga. His ex-editor kept complaining about the villains being too lame. Thats why is dragged on so long with new villains and forms constantly appearing.

You know, if you completely cut out the robo-saga, and were to cut the fat of the Buu saga, you'd have a pretty coherent story up through Battle of the Gods. That movie even began with characters being impressed by Goku being Freiza and Buu.

 

[Chumley]

Said it before, but Lucas knew when to step away and now his franchise is in good shape. Ridley can't and won't do the same thing for Alien.

 

[JonnyDBrit]

True there were issues back then. Really the Saiyan saga truly opened Pandora's Box so to speak but even Zenkai boosts had a drawback with the whole brink of death thing to really maximize its effectiveness, but even then it was wholly inconsistent in its depiction. Kao-Ken was similar in that it took a drastic toll on the person's body. Both had distinct disadvantages. There were ways Zenkai could have been effectively limited in how big an impact it could have on the overall series. But that kind of became pointless with everyone becoming SSJs during Cell.

Trunks and the start of the Android Saga though was the true point of no return to me. That entire sequence blew things wide open in a way nothing else had previously.

Basically, super saiyan removed any sense of an actual 'cost-benefit' balance from the fights in favour of 'be the strongest, full stop'.

With the Frieza saga that works because it's the first time and explicitly framed as Frieza's comeuppance for being so damned evil. With Cell however, a large portion of the story is dedicated to deliberately pushing out a new transformation that can best the villains because the Z fighters know it's in there somewhere. Honestly, the Buu saga should at least get credit for figuring out a better way to deal with the villain, even if it meant going through four rounds of trying a new transformation first.

Though I think the worst of what's been done to the lore of the setting has mostly come from Super, because good god that show has no sense of scale or restraint. In particular, retconning it so that Future Trunks' entire storyline from Z was basically pointless because

Spoiler

everyone (sans Mai because oh god why) dies anyway, fuck his happy ending apparently

. It just... trivialises so much of the previous story it's legitimately frustrating.

 

[MagnaderAlpha]

Not worse that many examples here, the bullshit Nomura, Kitase and Nojima did with the expanded FFVII universe sucked ass. It was the definition of "given the answers to questions nobody asked". "Hey guys, lets make FFVII's lore even more convoluted with Project G, Deepground, Omega WEAPON and Ziroconiade. Of course, don't forget Geostigma and Remnants. So what if none of that shit was in the original game, nor hinted in the original game. If it AIN'T broke, fix it, fix it and fix it some MORE! Then Nojima stands up and says, "Don't forget, FFVII and FFX are connected!"

 

[Extra Sauce]

To this day, I'm not sure people realize midochlorians don't cause the force in an organism, they just show force sensitivity/potential in it

 

[Slightly Live]

 

[Dongs Macabre]

Simon Furman's later Transformers stuff isn't very good.

Like having Arcee transitioning to female against her will.

Good thing later writers retconned that shit.

 

[jelly]

I'm open to loving Halo again but Halo 4 is mind boggling and pushed them down a ludicrous path that I don't know how they get of. If you asked them to sum up the story on a whiteboard and not look on in horror I wouldn't believe it. How could you have a discussion and think, this is fine. I can imagine game design caused headaches, they tried something else, it didn't work out so they thought up a garbage story to tie in old enemies and comrades for game play purposes. Even then, I don't think they needed to go that far with the Forerunners, magic DNA million year trick shot.

 

[Fersis]

JoJo lore is perfect. Here's my summary of JoJo lore:

Araki does whatever he wants and you just sit there and like it.

As someone that doesnt care about anime in general... i friggin' love me some JoJo.

 

[rackham]

Bleach. Never saw an anime/manga take such a hard turn into shit territory



World of Warcraft. It started downhill with mists of pandaria. The cinematic was literally a joke cinematic. I didn't mind it but that's when you knew the lore was sub par shit.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Good thing later writers retconned that shit.

"Because he was curious"?

Really?

 

[Spacejaws]

Lots of good ones.

My vote is for 'Community' tv series.
First season is literally the most charming and snappiest comedies I have ever seen.

Second season started pulling out the wacky factor in spades, has some lows that were not evident in tge first season and highs that almost exceed it. Characters start the journey of being falnderized.

Third Season onwards. Characters are flanderized. Jokes have a tendancy to be ham fisted. More cringe worthy moments than endearing. Not snappy.

Also throw in South Park and Final Fantasy 7 extended universe whatever please.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Yup.

I can't believe Blizzard fans give him a pass. One of the worst writers in video game history, Diablo 3 feels like it was made for elementary school children. It's embarrassing to hear the shit he put in that game as a grown ass man.

Oh, and they were just vicious when you pointed that out.

Now, not surpsingly, they admit it and legitimately don't care. /shrug

 

[SaviourMK2]

Akira Toriyama, 33 year champ, undefeated.
He keeps retconning his own rules, he's like that one asshole in a group of friends playing Monopoly, and he's the banker.

 

[Conkersbadfurday]

I mean, Alien lore was fucked to hell ages before he made his return to the franchise.

Only if you count the AvP movies as canon, which you shouldn't.

I mean Res has some goofy shit, but it's so far in the future that who cares? Plus it's a dark comedy.

 

[NHarmonic.]

Whoever was responsible for changing Cyclops optic blasts from red lasers to 'no you see his eyes are actually portals to a dimension filled with energy that punches'.

Reads like typical comic book nonsense.

 

[HamPster PamPster]

Jim Davis - Jon Arbuckle and the vet hooking up is bad lore

 

[S-Wind]

I fear that in at the rate she is going J. K. Rowling will be on this list in a few years.

 

[solarus]

Naruto, post time skip/shipuuden ruined everything.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

I fear that in at the rate she is going J. K. Rowling will be on this list in a few years.

"Cursed Child" read like a bad HP fanfic, right down the Mary Sue Author-insert character, so I'd say she's already there.

 

[Parallax]

Speaking of rails

Air Gear

lol

Oh great! Is good at that. He did it with tenjou tenge too. Starts off well, gets you hooked, then hits you with his version of homers "they've got these soft pretzels" line and you're having trouble keeping up with his madness despite reading every week.

Oh jesus, I peeped the manga, what the hell even happened there. Wasn't Obama even involved somehow lmao

he even swapped bodies with one of the female leads for "reasons"

 

[WhiteRabbitEXE]

"Cursed Child" read like a bad HP fanfic, right down the Mary Sue Author-insert character, so I'd say she's already there.

I haven't read/seen Cursed Child, but outside of a certain casting decision I genuinely loved Fantastic Beasts and am excited for the future films (outside of again, that casting decision).

 

[Ponn]

Bendis

 

[Octavia]

Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear.

MGS was a simple grounded yet intriguing story, MGS2 was an experiment in the fucking crazy and unfortunately the rest of the series had to greatly suffer because of it.

 

[TheXbox]

George Lucas and the prequels. The dude was so out of touch that you can actually trace his creative decision-making to the way other people absorbed the original films. Vader became a messiah because he was iconic. Obi Wan's desert robes became the Jedi uniform. The Clone Wars were waged by an army of literal clones. It's as if the prequels were made by an outsider misinterpreting Star Wars through the lens of fandom and iconography.

 

[GoodCoffeeJoey]

Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson.

 

[Earthbound64]

Masato Kato

**** Cross, it doesn't exist, and definitely isn't acceptable as a follow-up to Chrono Trigger.

 

[gabbo]

Sonic Team