Creator's Pet



A Creator's Pet is a character that is hated by the fanbase of a particular work, but ends up taking up a lot of screen-time.

The criteria for being a Creator's Pet is that the character must be:

A) Hated by the fans (exceptions exist)

B) Loved by the production team

C) Shoehorned into a lot of scenes

D) The other characters constantly praise them, even when they don't deserve it.

A Creator's Pet is usually/more often than not a Mary-Sue, that is to say, a self-insert who is highly unrealistic and has no flaws whatsoever. They can also be a Cousin Oliver, a kid who is inexplicably added to a work's roster to liven up an aging cast, named for Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch.

Examples

 * 1) Elmyra Duff: the counterpart to Elmer Fudd, was shoehorned into Pinky and the Brain at the request of network executives. She was hated and the show was canceled as a result.
 * 2) Chloe Carmichael: a complete and utter Mary Sue, and the third character added to the main cast to boost ratings, after Poof and Sparky. She only exists to make Timmy look bad, and has an incredibly contrived reason to have fairy godparents.
 * 3) Sparky: was also added to liven up the cast. He was hated due to being annoying and shoehorned in. He was removed after Season 9 ended.
 * 4) Mr. Turner and Denzel Crocker (Seasons 9 & 10): both characters are considered to be Butch Hartman's favorite characters. Thus, to make room for them getting more screen time, most of the other secondary characters were either written out of the show entirely or reduced to non-speaking background cameos. Most of the time whenever these two are on screen, their personalities are either shoved in as jokes or flanderize their characters.
 * 5) Anthony Caine (For Better or For Worse): Despite being heavily hated by many of the fans, Lynn Johnston put him back in the comic strip to serve solely as a romantic interest to Elizabeth.
 * 6) Trina Riffin (Grojband): she's always shown to be Todd Kauffman and Mark Thornton's favorite character according to the Grojband Wiki, who is shoehorned at all times.
 * 7) Michelle Tanner (Full House): Even though she was there since the beginning, as the character grew, she began to get a lot of screentime and marketing, sweeping all the other characters to the wayside.
 * 8) Wesley Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation): he is a Gary-Stu and is a walking deus-ex machina who always saves the whole ship at the last minute. Thankfully, he was kicked off the show after an incident where he inadvertently killed one of his classmates.
 * 9) Scrappy-Doo: he was incredibly annoying and took screen-time away from other characters, mostly Fred, Daphne, and Velma. He was added to boost ratings, and it somehow worked. In later installments of the franchise, Scrappy is made fun of or is an outright villain.
 * 10) PinkAru (Tooba Tooba Noonbory): the Korean-exclusive second season of Noonbory and the Super Seven. She's a token kid character who only exists to appeal to younger audiences and her crying is incredibly annoying. She also shoves a lot of characters, such as Totobory, to the wayside.
 * 11) Chibiusa (Sailor Moon): similar to PinkAru, she is a pink kid character who only exists so that little kids can relate to her. She was rather unpopular with Japanese audiences, at least in the anime. In Sailor Moon Crystal, however, the reception of Chibiusa is more positive since her personality here is closest to how she was in the manga.
 * 12) Cousin Oliver (The Brady Bunch): who was added in the last six episodes as the cast was growing old.
 * 13) Steve Urkel (Family Matters): while actually a good character, he does fit into the criterion that he is loved by the production team, shoehorned into a lot of scenes and hated by some fans (though not a major portion). This is mainly because he was originally slated to be a one-time character in the series. However, due to fan popularity, he eventually became more prominent as a character until eventually taking over the show as its main protagonist. He is a rare example of a good creator's pet.
 * 14) Roger Smith: Similar to Steve Urkel, while he is a great character, Roger would be the most overused character in American Dad!. This would be even worse in the TBS Era where he is pointlessly shoehorned in so much scenes. For some of the episodes, he would often be forced into the role of antagonist and the episodes would focus so much on him without elaborating on his character backstory.
 * 15) Mindy Melendez (Ready Jet Go!): Even though she was there since the premiere episode, she wasn't always there in development, only being created when the crew realized that they needed to appeal to younger audiences. Mindy was very popular with the show's target audience, but in season 2, she started to get all the screentime, promotion, and focus, especially since she turned five and finally got to go to space with the older kids. She was very annoying, a walking deus-ex machina, and often bullied others with no repercussions (such as when she triggered Sean's PTSD in "Galileo, Galileo!). As a result, she became the most hated character in the fandom.
 * 16) Jeffy: He is an Evelinka Puppet who was added in 2016, and immediately became controversial and hated for his annoying behavior, innapropriate jokes, and swearing habits. Still, he became a very frequent main character in 2017 onwards.
 * 17) Bowser Junior (SuperMarioLogan): His status of this can be quite inconsistent. During 2013 to 2015, he was hated and despised by many fans due to his bratty and annoying behavior, and being the cause of Chef Pee Pee torture porn. Not helping is that he was one of the overused characters from 2014 to 2015. He briefly stopped being this from 2016 to early 2019, where he got more character development, and became more likable and more mature, and fans started to like him. However from late 2019 to present, he instantly got flanderized, and though he still has fans who like him, there are more fans who are starting to hate him for being even more cruel, and not helping is that he never usually gets comeuppance for it, and still is an overused character to this day.
 * 18) Chuck (Angry Birds Toons, Season 3): always taking up way too much screentime during the whole season.
 * 19) Sergio and Carl Casagrande, although they were always was a part of the show, they are always shoehorned into scenes and some episodes.
 * 20) Evelyn (Meta Runner), the team behind the show was well aware of her being an obnoxious character but made her out to be the ideal of a "love-to-hate" type of character because of how "ridiculous" she is...
 * 21) Meggy Spletzer, While she is technically a divisive character rather than hated, she still technically fits this criterion. While she can be greatly written and likable in some episodes/arcs, she simultaneously suffers from character inconsistency throughout the series, these traits being a "Mary Sue" in her earlier Inkling appearances, to her being a "wangst" who is depressed and unsure of what she wants to do with her life. She also has some unlikeable moments here and there as well. Similar to Steve Urkel, she was initially planned to be a one-time character (who was initially described to be an "accident" by the creators). Because of fan demand, she became one of the more overused characters of SMG4, and become more major in SMG4 episodes as the series went on (to put it statistically, her appearances skyrocketed in 2019, with her appearing in 35 out of 48 episodes; a 73% appearance rate). In 2021, she has gotten a spin-off series, so she would take a break in the regular series, which admittedly feels necessary given her excessive spotlight in the SMG4 series. Despite this, she is still overused via her live streams and still has a lot of merch centered around her.
 * 22) Gelatin (Battle For Dream Island) (He gets far too much screentime in BFB and gets shoehorned too much to the point he appears in every episode of said season)
 * 23) Kaname Asagiri (Magical Girl Site) (A sadistic torturer who gets a lot of screen-time luring her sister Aya, to help relieve his stress.)
 * 24) Denise (Turma da Mônica): She was originally a supporting character with no personality and a fixed look until she was redesigned by Emerson Abreu, who not only changed her appearance and personality, but forced her to gain extreme focus and prominence in the stories he writes.
 * 25) Milena (Turma da Mônica): an Afro-descendant girl who was created with the aim of promoting diversity and balancing the core of characters, but with no personality and a Mary-Sue whom everyone thinks is perfect and that MSP forces the public to accept her as the fifth protagonist of the franchise.
 * 26) Dolly (101 Dalmatian Street): She is shoehorned into every single episode of the show (excluding the shorts), and has a lot of episodes focusing on her - either on her own or together with her brother Dylan. Sure, both of them are main characters, but she is still shoehorning for that.
 * 27) Triple D (101 Dalmatian Street): These diva triplets also appear very frequently in the show, and they have three episodes dedicated to them!
 * 28) Lana Lang (Smallville): The writers kept her around long after her role as Clark Kent's love interest became redundant.
 * 29) Captain Hero (Drawn Together): While he wasn't as heavily shoehorned in prior seasons, he was the most severely crammed in season 3, to the point that it became the downfall of Drawn Together.
 * 30) Felicity Smoak (Arrow): in Seasons 1 and 2, she was an Adorkable IT Girl and the source of a lot of the show's humor. As of the third season, she has taken on several of the traits that once led to Laurel and Thea being polarizing, is consistently depicted as being in the right, constantly whining and complaining and has had large amount of screen-time dedicated to her subplots, more so than Roy or Diggle. In comparison, Diggle (Oliver's longest running ally) only received a proper subplot in Season 4 because it was tied so closely to the main plot. The showrunners and most of the writers openly acknowledge that she's their favorite character. This treatment continued until Season 6, even as Felicity became more controversial, and culminated in the ultimate Never Live It Down moment: the double wedding, which many fans still haven't forgiven the character for to this very day.