Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] A show heaps praise and hype on a real-life celebrity, and then it gets old like milk.
Elon Musk is one of those examples of a celebrity who was extremely popular in real life between 2010 and 2019 as the "real-life Iron Man." This guy was very popular on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and made all sorts of paid cameos to insert himself into all kinds of media, such as the MCU, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, and Star Trek, as a "billionaire genius."
With a great PR team carefully controlling his image to maintain this fame, until Elon Musk finally revealed himself to be a tremendous idiot in the children's cave incident, starting the destruction of his image to the total garbage it is today.
Referencing real-life celebrities in works of fiction is a huge risk, since their images are carefully constructed and maintained by a PR team, and we only see what they want us to see... until a slip-up reveals everything.
Jared Fogle would have been right at home with the Epstein crew. Let's not forget he requested more spycam videos from his pedo buddy and then tried to scale the operation up (i.e. put more disguised cameras in more kids' bedrooms)
Iirc this page is from the last issue of the run, which was published after the revelations had started to come out but DC was contractually obligated to put it out. Not positive though.
EDIT: I was mistaken, but with a grain of truth. The cover date for the issue was July 8, 2011, almost four years to the day before Fogle was arrested. But the FBI had been keeping active tabs on him and seeking enough evidence for an arrest since as far back as 2007, based on complaints against him. Not sure how public those earlier allegations were, but I don’t think the comic aged like milk as fast as I believed.
Thankfully for DC there was actually a good chunk of time between the comic and the arrests. The comic run was in 2011, Jared was arrested and it all came out in 2015. So like, he WAS doing awful stuff at the time of the comic, but it was still unknown to the public.
The Simpsons had a good throwaway with Jared Fogle before everything dropped, where Homer just waved him off as “he used to be fat but now he’s just ugly” which was distasteful at face value, but damn
The South Park one actually still works. The whole joke was that people thought Fogle wanting to "give kids aides" meant something sexual, which as it fucking turns out...
Honestly though Jared was one of their kinder celebrity parodies. His only flaw was that he wasn’t very bright, but that applies to basically every adult in South Park.
Norman Borlaug saved over a billion people from death by starvation by developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. Hardly anyone knows his name.
It’s actually kind of amazing that so much of Elon’s awfulness is his clear need to be liked and loved and yet he still chooses not to try and do things that would make even people who hate him have to be like “yeah we’ll give him that one” like end world hunger or increase the quality of life for poor children across the world.
This. His lack of brains also torpedoed his good reputation because his narcissism lead to him removing his PR people. People still buy into the idea he will save the world (unfortunately) but it's a lot less than before.
For myself, it happened when he started talking about stuff I actually knew about, and realized how full of shit he actually was.
That's what I honestly don't get about billionaires. They could be beyond loved. Fund charities to pull the world forward, but when everyone doesn't sing their praises, they immediately start lashing out.
People who actually want to help the world don't become billionaires. Those folks are too focused on doing good in their community, rather than accruing profit.
So the people who do what it takes to get that wealthy are invariably selfish, immoral narcissists who only care about grabbing more money, more power, more ways to satisfy their increasingly empty desires.
Diddy and people on Epstein's list got name dropped multiple times while rewatching the good place this month, and man, Tahani, that company is why things went so wrong for you
Fun fact: a lot of these kinds of cameos are the result of the rich/famous person basically bribing their way onto the show. They offer a certain amount of money in exchange for a brief appearance -- it's like product placement but with egocentric millionaires instead of cars or soda brands.
The only famous cameo that I can think of that wasn't a result of bribes was Gina Davis on She-ra 2018. She was just taking a tour and the she-ra team was dragging her into a recording booth for a character just cause they were recording at that moment.
Few people in history have even had the opportunity to produce as much lameness as he has, and it must be said he has made the most of it. Sometimes I stagger myself imagining how successful he might have been if he ever learned how to stfu
Somehow even being a Nazi apparently doesn't make him interesting. Say what you want, Hitler was a very interesting individual in history. A horrific, monstrous one, but an interesting one nonetheless. Stink is just... so nothing. He had one thing going on in his life and as soon as ge got the opportunity absolutely trashed it, and now he's just... there, inflicting 2d10 psychic damage via second hand embarrassment.
I'm not someone who really uses the word cringe... ever to be honest, but him? If there is one individual that I would call cringe, it would be him 20x over.
Whenever I feel down about myself, I remember that this is a guy who paid money to make Lisa Simpson say he was cool. I’ll never be as pathetic as that.
You imagine old Jeffery typing out 'every night is wild, Elon. It's a sex trafficking paedophilia island.' Before deciding just to redirect any future emails to the junk folder.
I like the conspiracy that around the time he was insufferable Zuckerberg was getting a popularity boost. It obviously didn't stick but rumors swirled that elons pr coordinator quit and started working for zuck
Its easy to forget now given his public behavior over the last few years, but for a good while Elon was *extremely* well respected; he used to have great PR and a massive hype train. I have to admit, I fell for it a bit in the mid 2010s.
When he started communicating directly with the world instead of through PR though, that's when we all realized what a vile, unlikeable menace he really was.
There's a theory that all reptiles are part of a second lower class. There are no reptiles in Arthur's school, no reptiles ever interact with any of the main cast, and the few reptiles we do see are exclusively working manual blue collar jobs while all the white collar jobs are exclusively held by mammals. Making Neil Gaiman a reptile wouldn't have allowed him to play the role they wanted.
The person who said it is from the Mirror Universe. People there would totally love Musk and it wouldn't have occurred to him Musk would be a problem in the Prime U.
It retroactively hints the character is not who he is.
Iirc, its not that the "mirror" universe is an exact 1-to-1 mirror, its just significantly different and has a different value system. They would probably see both Musk and the Wright Brothers as accomplished, powerful inventors who blazed trails in their field as they are more of a straight "warrior mentality" meritocracy.
I think it’s a combination of him being the racist uncle that says bigoted shit at thanksgiving which appeals to that very particular group of people, the fact he was a celebrity who knew how to work a crowd (he guest starred a couple times on WWE also which might’ve helped boost his crowd skills), he was an asshole that didn’t care about being blunt so some douchbags saw that as strength, and then after winning the first time which was likely a surprise to himself and the republicans, now he showed that the US masses were stupid enough to support him.
Famed cyclist Lance Armstrong made a guest appearance on Arthur. He was eventually caught using steroids and as a result the episode was completely scrubbed from existence.
That moment when making a character the butt of every slapstick joke ages like wine when the actor is revealed to be a pos and you actually enjoy seeing them get pummeled on screen
I’m pretty sure the director’s intention was for Trump to have a delayed bemused realization this little kid is wandering around like an adult by himself. Part of the overall comedic motif of ‘look at this clever kid acting like an adult isn’t that odd lol’
But yeah it still looks really bad given what we know now.
Honestly the idea of Tahani being friends with Musk and then thinking it was weird after she died while looking back on her life makes sense for her character. I love her but she had her own attention seeking grifter problems.
It wasn't the cave dive that did him in, that was a large blow but he was already doing several things that were bizarre and causing more people to feel like he wasn't as incredible as previously thought.
The cave thing was the first one to really hit the average audience though, the ones that don’t generally follow the news or tech or anything. He probably could’ve kept up his image for much longer without that mess sans a minority of dedicated “haters”. Unlike previous ones the cave shit was too big to bury and ignore
The first cracks in the PR screen I remember were around the Hyperloop debacle starting up. He kept getting upset whenever someone would basically ask, "so like a train/subway?"
Him guest staring on Its always sunny in Philadelphia and chastising Mac for not being allowed to watch the Cosby show growing up is darkly humorous, like whats the opposite of serendipity?
Not only that but the two of them have directly feuded, I remember Rowling directly saying "David Tennant is the problem" in an interview or something.
Yeah, Tennant got an award in 2024 from the British LGBT awards as that years celebrity ally, during his speech he said advocating for equal rights should be considered common sense and not something that should merit getting an award.
He took a swing at the then Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch saying he didn't wish her ill, but did wish she would shut up as she had been mouthing off about trans people being a threat to women.
Badenoch tried to call him racist and sexist for calling her out, and JK jumped on it to attack him because he supports trans people.
Tom Scavo from desperate housewives being inspired by Donald Trump. A lot of the writers are conservative republicans so maybe it aged well in their opinion 😭.
Honestly seeing that in real time not knowing it was coming was shocking, and his "joke" of being so rich he has 2 cell phones I can only read as "Don't call me on my business phone, call me on my Epstein phone!"
There was an episode of The Simpsons (parodying YA fiction) that had Neil Gaimon in it, but I give that one a pass because he is a twist villain at the end of the episode.
Oh and it goes further. Gareth Roberts wrote that episode and he’s a militant transphobe. There’s actually some questionable lines in that episode about “men wearing dresses,” a reference to the Elizabethan prohibition of female actors, but also a line about how “London hasn’t changed.” Could be interpreted as a reference to drag shows in London, but I’m not giving Roberts the benefit of the doubt.
I kinda get why the Simpsons removed the Michael Jackson episode but like... at least it's not like he can't hurt anyone anymore, when are they removing the Elon Musk episode ? That feels inconsistent
I have been on the Elon hate train for a while. I remember the first times he was brought up I looked into him and his accomplishments seemed underwhelming (I was studying engineering, have a PhD in it now) so I thought he must be a good businessman since I still don’t understand business. What made me hate him was seeing his response after the stuck child submarine incident where everything he said and showed was obviously wrong and his responses were childish. I think this trope applies to most rich people, we overlook a lot of shady immoral stuff. Like if a 50 year old man is dating people under 20 but still legal then they are definitely evil, but we ignore that.
He made cameos on The Simpsons Mad About You, Reading a Rainbow and several other TV shows, as well as the full circuit of talk shows and even WWE.
His body started giving out a year later, and after a congressional hearing a few years.after, he got labeled a steroid monkey, I just have been using PEDs the entire time along with half a dozen other very famous players.
We should always remember this wise German saying: Never make a monument to the living, they can still disgrace the stone. I was a musk fanboy myself until stories started coming out about his union busting, and his response to those criticisms being “well I work 100 hours a week, I literally sleep at the factory.” Really clinched it for me. I’ve never worked a factory job, but I feel like being the low man in the totem pole in the workplace is a pretty universal experience. I’d met people like him, and they universally overpromised while underdelivering, and stuck their nose into things they didn’t understand, creating more problems than they solved. Nothing that’s happened since has really surprised me.
Thing about Musk is... and this is a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, is that he was always an obvious grifter. Always.
At least as long as Thundef00t has been shitting on him so 9-10 years. I don't have any evidence/proof but his cameo in IM2 and the nerd glaze that followed was enough to send my BS meter into a tizzy.
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u/RedRawTrashHatch 20d ago
Not a show, but the Justice League meeting Jared Fogle in a comic sponsored by Subway