Hate Sink Wiki Rant
This wiki should not exist. To be fair, at least as a concept it is not as bad the quality Wikis, who acted like media pieces are factually good or bad, when it is actually subjective and while it is totally fine to express your opinion, labeling art as good or bad should be left to decide for each person and not expressed by communities as common knowledge. For example, it's fine if reviewers individually or as a team label something good, bad or in between. It's fine if a circle of people have the same opinions about a piece of media as long as they are not pressuring anyone to agree and as long as said piece of media isn't (seriously) harmful. What is not wrong is to create an entire wiki space that labels subjective concepts as good or bad as if those were objective, universal standards. The reason why the idea of a hate sink wiki isn't as bad, is because it adds characters who were meant by the authors to be hated, in other words it is based on author intentions, rather than quality. If for instance an author confirms they wrote one of their characters as a hatesink, than the label hatesink objectively applies to said character, regardless of the quality of writing. The problem with this is that authors don't often confirm their intentions with their characters, making it hard to tell if a loathsome character was meant to be this way at times.
Now despite my criticism I must admit that I agree with some of their pages. I agree for instance about characters like Sho Tucker and Umbridge being hatesinks even without the author's confirmation. However, many of their pages stretch the definition of hatesink and they disallow pages of characters who are way more vile, annoying or pathetic that some of their existing pages.
They add for instance Suzy Johnson. While she is extremely selfish and manipulative, she is not a murderer, she is only doing evil if you get in her way or if she considers so, her evil deeds are always played for laughs and don't ruin lives and she shows some genuine kindness and relatability when she doesn't think she could lose Jeremy's affection. Now, I don't claim she is a very sympathetic or noble demon, for the most part she isn't, but she is on the lower scale of villainy and her evil schemes are smart and funny, making her way more redeemable, funny and complex than an actual hatesink. Meanwhile, they disallow Junko Enoshima, a mass-murderer and hopecrusher, because she is funny. In this case I do agree with their decision, but the fact that they decided Suzy is a hatesink, despite also being a funny a villain and way less evil than Junko, show's how murky their standards are. They also do not list Angelica Pickles, despite her being generally more annoying than Suzy as she screams more and she has a bigger ego. Also, while bot characters are goofy, Suzy's plans are way more unrealistic and ridiculous than Angelica's, making Angelica feel more like a realistic mean little girl thus more detestable. Not to mention that Angelica is almost always in Rugrats while Suzy appears in only 3 episodes, giving the latter less time to set an impression. I can also list more a lot more characters more annoying than Suzy who didn't make it to the wiki: Sarah from Ed, Edd n Eddy, Millie from Kid vs. Kat, Jake Spidermonkey from My Gym Partner's a Monkey. I don't think those characters should be listed as hatesinks either, though I think it is debatable wether Angelica and Millie are suppose to be hated, since they are just jerks at worst, albeit exaggeratedly bad, and they did show redeeming qualities, I still wouldn't say we can surely label them as hatesinks. I feel like the internet started recently to overhate on Suzy and I don't get why. Now, I understand hating her, I don't even hate her and even I feel like she could've been better written, but I feel like some people give her more shit compared to other characters that are way more vile or annoying than her.
What I find ridiculous is that they sometimes even add very minor characters who are standard jerks or bullies. They added Bufford's past bully who appeared in only one episode for only a few minutes and the worst he did was standard bullying and trying to eat Bufford's goldfish, the latter being a stupid act played for laughs. Sure, he only had only one funny moment that was at the same time an attempt to kill a pet, and sure, it's very bad that he was beating up and picking up on smaller kids. I totally understand if you hate him, I sort of do myself, everyone should hate bullying, but it's not much worse than what kids typically do. I don't claim everyone was a bully in their childhood, but what kid didn't get into fights or acted bratty at times? Sure, he is worse than a typical kid, but again, it's nothing outright evil and we only got a few minutes of this guy. He didn't get enough screen time to leave a lasting impression. We also don't know about his motivation. For all we know, he could be a troubled bully. There was nothing to imply that, but there was nothing to debunk that either. Hating him is understandable, but what makes the wiki contributors so sure that this minor character who is nothing more than a standard and stupid bully who barely got screen time was intended by the creators to be so leave lasting hatred within the audiences to the point that it is worth writing an entire page describing why this character was meant to be hated.
This Wiki should not exist. It might not label quality levels to media, but writing an entire wiki on how to interpret an author's intentions isn't much better, unless maybe they limit themselves exclusively to what authors themselves have to say. This is telling people how to interpret media and I wouldn't have a problem with it if they didn't treat it like it's a fact. TV tropes pretty much has the same problem. I think they should've kept only the definition on hatesink and not listed any examples, again, unless the author confirmed a character to be a hatesink.











