Ron the Death Eater and why I hate this trope.

What is Ron the Death Eater, well according to TV Tropes: "The result of either shoehorning a good canon character into being a villain or making a villain significantly more evil than in canon is Ron the Death Eater."

Read about it here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RonTheDeathEater

I absolutely detest this trope if the story is not obviously set in an alternate universe.

I get it, we all have characters that we dislike, even if in canon they are part of the cast of good characters. I mean we can't like everybody, that's just given. What I will never get is why people would turn canonically good characters into jerks or worse irredeemable evil villains. This is not just something that happens in fanfiction, this actually can happen in published works, be it TV shows, books, movies and the like.

Granted the whole point of fan fiction is to write your own take on your favorite characters from whatever media you are writing fanfiction about, but still. Really?

I will only forgive this trope if the setting is obviously meant to be an alternate universe, where the personalities of characters are already shifted anyway and hell it makes for an amusing inter-dimensional traveling fun when the actual canon characters meet these drastically different versions of themselves. Hell, I have had some fun with that myself in the TMNT community.

But I guess I'm just not a vindictive enough person to get why making a character you dislike into something they are not actually in canon out of pure spite.

I'm pretty sure you all know that Princess Celestia is the biggest victim of this trope in the MLP fandom, especially in the early years. Hell, there is a reason there exists a "Protect Princess Celestia" group on this very webpage.

So why do I hate it?

I feel it is an insult to the original creator of said character. A mockery of what they created and worked hard on creating, probably out of pure love and desire to create something. Princess Celestia being such a big victim of this trope, especially infuriates me because it violates just everything about her and what Lauren Faust wanted her to be all about.

And there are plenty of examples of other ponies falling victim to this blasted trope, Rainbow Dash running a foal grinding factory, Pinkie Pie psychotic serial killer, Applejack a racist supremacist. Here is the thing, some of these did yes start as just a joke, fans not being serious but.... here is another thing. Jokes translate poorly on the internet and as the years go on, jokes often lose their original meaning and some people read these as hard solid facts that this is actually how the characters are. I have seen fans actually believe that Celestia is a tyrant and Pinkie Pie is a psychotic killer, even if there is nothing in the show that actually supports that. Nope, they just read that on the internet, and as you all know, [sarcasm]the internet only has true things one them.[/sarcasm]

This is another reason I hate this trope, it can lead to people actually believing this about the characters because a fanfiction told them so or a meme on the internet and I wish I was joking about this.

My personal rule regarding characters I personally do not care much for is either not to use them, or if I am forced to use them because no other character fits the role I need, is to simply portray the traits that I do like about them.

For example, Pinkie Pie. She is not my favorite MLP character, I have some minor issues with her portrayal in the show. However, I've made absolutely sure that every time I do use her, she is portraited fairly. I do not diminish her, but I still use her sparingly.

The same goes for Discord, another character I am rather iffy about. Instead of just brutalizing his character, I just either don't use him or those moments I have used him I portray him as fairly as possible but sparingly.

I just do not villanize characters out of spite, I consider it unfair to their original creators and I consider it an insult to the fans of those characters. I certainly take no pleasure seeing some of my favorite characters suddenly turned into despicable mockeries (I'm looking at you DuckTales and Doofus Drake. Yes I liked that character from the original show, thank Celestia they barely use him in the reboot.)

Of course, this is just my opinion. I have no powers to dictate what people do and my cardinal rule is never to tell people what to write, but at least now you know why I personally am not too fond of seeing good characters suddenly turned evil just because someone happened to dislike them.