Forrest Gump is the most hated person in Bayou La Batre

With the death of Bubba in Vietnam, Forrest keeps a promise he made to go into the shrimping business in Bubba's hometown, which in this case Bayou La Batre, Alabama, an area of the country not particularly conducive to aspiring young entrepreneurs with minimal personal assets in the late 1960s. Undaunted, Forrest buys his own shrimping boat, and basks in the rays of punishing failure for several months, enduring an endless torrent of grumpy hate from a legless Lieutenant Dan. He finally hits a stroke of good luck when Hurricane Carmen strikes the area and demolishes every single shrimping boat in the area, sparing only Forrest's busted old trawler.

With no competition to speak of, Forrest catches all the shrimp himself and starts the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, turning him into a millionaire almost overnight. He invests some of that capital into up-and-coming Apple Computers and graduates to a "go-zillionaire" (his words), leaving him free to mow lawns and raise a kid without any financial worries for the rest of his life.


But does anyone realize that Forrest is now probably the most hated man in Bayou La Batre? I mean, Bayou La Batre isn't exactly a household name town, but they are known as the "Seafood Capital of Alabama," and the fishing and shrimping industries are its lifeblood. In 2005, they were so devastated by Hurricane Katrina that they required a lot of outside assistance just to survive. Shrimp boat owners aren't rich -- they've got everything they own and their livelihoods and source of income tied up in their boats. Now imagine if, amidst all that hardship, someone decided to build up a monopoly and horde all the shrimp for himself and his dirty pet hippie, all because his boat was lucky enough to escape destruction.

Forrest may get to polish a billion-dollar nest egg all he wants, but literally every other captain in the area has had their livelihood utterly destroyed by the storm. Even when its fishing and shrimping industries are functioning normally, Bayou La Batre has a notoriously high poverty rate -- many of the shrimpers would've had a hard enough time recovering from the hurricane without Forrest coming in and laying claim to the entire shrimp harvest with his own corporate fleet. Even if these guys could get the insurance to replace their wrecked boats months later, it doesn't matter -- that's Bubba Gump territory, and they'd have to move to new waters.

Forrest obviously didn't do this maliciously and was merely capitalizing on his good fortune, but the fact remains that a staggering number of Bayou La Batre's residents no longer have any means to support themselves or their families. You can imagine them hating on Forrest Gump and his fishing company greatly for stealing their livelihoods from them.