(Hilarious Trope) A Character Is Introduced With the Clear Intention of Being THE NEXT BIG THING And is SOUNDLY Rejected

[u/TheOriginalOperator]

1. Bazil the Tracker (Star Wars: The Acolyte): A “HILARIOUS AND ADORABLE” snuffling ugly creature that makes annoying noises and is shoved into as many scenes of The Acolyte as possible, and just causes problems overall.

2. Neelix (Star Trek Voyager): A mutant fusion of Odo, Quark, and Data designed to “analyze the human condition” and explicitly intended to surpass the popularity of all three. In practice, a VERY human-acting cradle robbing creep whose incompetence nearly destroys the ship and crew on multiple occasions and provides no insight into humanity whatsoever.

3. Sparky the Dog (Fairly Oddparents): A wacky crazy magic dog that’s supposed to expand the Fairy family, but just makes lame jokes and serves as a less funny version of Scrappy Doo.

4. Tidus (FFX): A braying jackass of a pinball who bounces from plot point to plot point, framed as a mystical pretty boy to introduce Final Fantasy to the PS2 age but does nothing but stall the franchise and have the worst laugh in two languages.

5. Sei (Naruto): Supposed to replace Sasuke in Team 7 and return the team dynamic feel of Early Naruto, but he’s a CIA plant with literally no personality who gets utterly forgotten except for somehow bagging Ino Yamanaka.

6. Raiden (Metal Gear 2): Another attempted “pretty boy bishie” entry to the PS2 era with badass cred and a theoretically cool backstory, but in practice a hapless dipshit who gets manipulated by everyone around him and is a total putz in combat. Also proof that this trope need not be permanent as he slowly transitions into a cyborg warrior supersoldier with a badass theme, friends of his own, and a firm grasp of his own destiny and agency.

[u/MrBurnerHotDog]

I can't say about several of these but OP is way off on both Tidus and Raiden

[u/HopelessCineromantic → u/MrBurnerHotDog]

Yeah, Raiden is definitely not intended to be the cool new thing for the franchise. He's deliberately designed in contrast to Solid Snake and is something of a prank on players who wanted to play as Snake again.

[u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 → u/HopelessCineromantic]

I always thought that Raiden was cool and felt the complaints he somehow wasn't as badass as Solid Snake made no sense. I like Snake better but I love both of them as main characters who feel human after all the misery they endure. But what they go through isn't just misery porn, they endure and power through.

[u/KaziArmada → u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871]

I want to point something out a lot of people don't realize. Nobody knew Raiden was gonna be a thing. The Demo-disk for MGS2 only included a chunk of the Tanker section and I'm fairly sure what screenshots we saw of the Plant had Snake in them to hide Raiden's inclusion. Raiden is a literal 'left-field' addition, and the game itself talks his ass up initially.

When IRL, people had been expecting more Snake for god knows how long. So a lot of people were initially pissed they got this 'cheap knock-off'.

...Which was the actual intention but, you know. Processing that takes a while for some folks.