User blog comment:Stryzzar/Where to from the Reset Button?/@comment-27329394-20150110172035/@comment-27329394-20150111163410

Long post incoming. I still completely disagree.

Every Mike fan that I know likes Mike's regular persona too so I don't see what you mean by that. And even though there are good reasons people change their opinion on Mike, I feel like part of the reason why people change their opinion on Mike is because of how aggressive they are in their saying opinions. And a lot of people just leave the wiki and never return after this happens. I know that because I've seen it happen on a blog before. It's like you're not even allowed to like him. It's shameful to me that so many people have this mentality that you are forced to hate him, but I digress.

The opinions really could get worse. What if more people disliked him, but for other reasons? Again, you have to look past Tumblr and the wiki to see most of the Mike fans, but there are a lot of people who like him out there, whether it be on CN where the target demographic is or elsewhere where the opinion of Mike is less serious. What if you took away the entertainment value from him? I mean you already have to deal with the whole bringing-back-his-personalities thing and taking it more seriously, but that dimension would take away what his fans like about him. Basically, if the whole redemption thing doesn't work and his fans don't find him fun to watch, it would, in fact, be worse.

I feel like the requested approach would just be some big PSA for the thing anyway. That's not something I'd like to see at all.

Bringing a character back to "repair" the damage done is a bad idea because, under that logic, every character everywhere deserves redemption. What if it doesn't work? You just wasted an entire slot of a character and dug yourself in a deeper hole. The best case scenario is a few people don't hate him, which doesn't offset the alternative. Even then, you are using an entire slot to attempt to improve a character. From the mentality people have over him this wouldn't even do anything no matter how he did. When there are so many other characters to choose from, the last thing I would do as a producer is bring back the one that stirred up a lot of controversy.

I'll give you an example of what I would think over one of my least favorite animated characters of all time, Bendy (from Fosters), returned for an episode. My initial reaction would be frustration, because I already hate him, and now he is just in the way of a bunch of other characters that I already enjoy more. And no matter what happened, I'd have a sickening memory of his first appearance. Bendy is a guy who is screwed by a conceptual standpoint for me and nothing he can do could change that. What they did was apologized for making the episode, never included him in any other episode, and never brought up the episode ever again. I'm aware that people don't have personal problems with Bendy like Mike, but what's to say they can't just do the same thing? They don't have a duty to bring an unpopular character back on the show at all.

I'm 100% sure more people hate Bendy than Mike but people's hatred of Mike is more intense, so yeah. Same deal really. Mike's screwed conceptually, which hurts his chances of doing anything.

Mike also has the advantage of being in a show where the only guarantee is the host. When someone like Lisa Simpson is unpopular, you kind of have to still include her because she has to be in every episode anyway. But for Total Drama, you can just not include any given character and it would still run swimmingly. Not including Mike would still make the show make sense.

And this is coming from a guy who doesn't mind Mike and even kind of wants to like him. But the last thing I want to see is this wiki going into an uproar about the same sh*t over stuff from a long time ago that at this point I've heard endlessly.

And let's be honest here, would you even enjoy him if he went through all of that? I'm sure that, at best, you'd only be neutral with him. That's not worth the trouble at all.

tl:dr Not bringing him for "redemption" back would preserve why his fans like him, let his haters eventually overlook him, and let them not have to deal with a bunch of angry fans throughout.