These days, there's one big taboo: a persona collapse.
If you've always been a bad person, never doing good, it's whatever. But if you start out with a good-guy persona and end up doing something jerky, once your persona collapses, the backlash is much worse.
Take Xia Siyu for example, she used to be full of scandals, so when the "simp" rumor surfaced, she did get criticized for a good while, but she didn't care at all. By the second and third episodes, she started saving money and kept outsmarting the production team as well as helping Bo Yan with chores, suddenly her reputation improved. Plus, the sympathy for never winning any awards and her optimism in facing difficulties—at least the audience perception of her was pretty good.
