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• Boeing vs Airbus is a huge one in the aerospace industry world. The two companies are notable for possibly the bitterest and nastiest commercial rivalry in the world of manufacturing. It is exacerbated by various factors, such as Airbus's "Reimbursable Launch Investment" from EU governments (loans that have to be paid back at generous rates of interest, plus royalties if the aircraft is a success) and the US government's effective subsidizing of Boeing with pork barrel military contracts (and in a few cases free money), which were the subject of the world's largest trade dispute ever during 2005-2012, which ultimately ended with a World Trade Organisation decision in Airbus's favor. The fallout is still settling, although there are signs that the US and Boeing have tried to get around the decision, and the EU is threatening to place trade sanctions of $19 billion on Boeing. Add lots of internet Misplaced Nationalism (Americans want red-blooded American planes whose wives make them apple pie and who take their kids to baseball practice, not cappucino-drinking European commie planes with bad teeth and who spend their time looking at modern art galleries, and vice-versa) and the thing can get very nasty on enthusiast forums. It also reaches the pilots too - older pilots who were weaned on Boeing products before Airbus hacked out its market share in The Nineties prefer their old friends, but younger pilots prefer Airbuses because they are easier to fly and because of their standardized cockpit layouts a pilot can qualify on one and have done most of the work for all the others.
• Porsche cars. Every single time a new model line is introduced it divides the owners/fan base. This happened when the Cayenne SUV came out, before that it was old school air-cooled 911 fans incensed at the new water-cooled 911, universally the 911 fans are putting down anything not-911 and getting a similar treatment from non-911 fans, and way back in the sixties there was the now familiar cry of "It's not a real Porsche!" when Porsche made their first major model change, introducing the 911 to replace the 356 model.
  • Car companies can fall victim to this. General Motors is a very good example, being essentially the automotive equivalent of Sonic the Hedgehog. Pontiac's dead? Good riddance, or is is ruined forever? Cadillac having front-wheel-drive cars? Acceptable or not?
• AK-47 vs. M-16 for assault rifle people. The youtube videos have huge numbers of comments, and that's just the beginning.
  • To ~93% percent of the participants on both sides, the AK-74 is just an academic term, and the AK-100 series doesn't even exist. To the AK side, the M-16 never got upgraded, or cleaning kits, or any sort of improvement at all. To the M-16 side, the AK is so innacurate that the safest place to be when it is fired is directly in front of the muzzle, and they refuse to even touch Kalashnikovs, or even discuss the fact that certain members of the AK-100 family come in the same caliber as their beloved M-16's. Then the AK fanbase assumes that an M-16 will always jam, no matter what, and that the small caliber rounds can only kill you if you are shot 10 times, or if you bleed out on the ground for a couple minutes, and wooe betide you should you either take a third option or say that you like both. However, depending on the setting, your mileage may vary significantly.
  • Even more vicious is the infighting between diferent members and factions of each camp. The M-16 people argue over mods and manufacturers. The AK people go on over the 74's 5.45X39 round vs. the old 7.62 and whether or not it was a good idea.
    • Nowadays this have eased somewhat, with AK's availability in almost any caliber imagined. People still argue which one is better, though.
    • Don't forget country of manufacture (particularly the cheaper ones like Romanians are very divisive), importer, chromed vs non-chromed, and stamped vs. milled.
• In handguns, there's the debates about revolvers versus pistols. The revolver camp goes on about the low caliber ammunition used by pistols and how unreliable they are. The pistol camp goes on about how revolvers are antiquated and that magnum catriges are just silly.
  • Don't even get started on the M9 vs. M1911 debate, or for that matter, any sort of debate about which makes a better bullet: a small, fast cartidge that tumbles through flesh, or a big heavy slug that wrecks whatever it hits.
  • Any brand of pistol vs. another brand of pistol. One common example (involving the two biggest selling types of firearms) is Glock "Safe Action" vs 1911-style "cocked and locked" carry.
• Fans of all things zombie have a broken base over whether or not Romero-style zombies can successfully over take the real world. One group of fans says yes, and it would happen fast. Another group says it can happen but nowhere near as fast as it's depicted in movies/literature, etc... Basically it'll be like a slow burn. The last group says a zombie plague won't end the world because everyone and they momma knows what a zombie is and how to dispose of it. And that the government won't just collapse within a matter of months like it's usually depicted. At the most the zombie plague would just be a recurring health problem like Cancer and Aids.
  • A sub-group of the latter group agrees with this but thinks the casualties would be more devastating then the last group thinks.
  • Cracked discuses why the Zombie Apocalypse will fail
  • Cracked discuses why the Zombie Apocalypse could succeed
    • To be fair the second article discuss how the zombie can be created and the first one how it will fail quickly and they are perfectly compatible with each other.
  • There is another Zombie-related issue breaking up the fans as well, namely on the usefulness of the .22 caliber round against a zombie. Ever since Max Brooks came out with The Zombie Survival Guide, there has been an ongoing argument on the rounds effectiveness of destroying the brain of a zombie. Proponents argue it would bounce around inside of the skull and it's more common than dirt. Detractors say there is no guarantee that it will even penetrate the skull or do that brain-destroying damage. Some have gone so far to say that the .22 is the only bullet that would be effective at stopping a zombie and all other rounds are less useful or just plain useless.
• Expo goers are in two camps: those that hate Caramelldansen and Hare Hare Yukai, and those who wish the fandom would stop posting threads about it on the boards.
• What should be considered Porn or "nude/erotic art"... or both. If there's a line, where should the distinction be drawn? Keep in mind erotic art can be very pornographic as well. In fact the line is so blured some think there isn't a difference anymore.
  • There's actually a website that lets you be the judge regarding some of the pictures they show you.
• Video game magazines aren't safe from this either. Nintendo Power gets the most flack since many anti Nintendo fans always claim that the magazine is "biased" towards its own first party games by giving it high scores. When Nintendo Power was outsourced to another publisher, the staff slightly changed. People still claim Nintendo Power is biased, but will somehow agree with them if the magazine gives any game an 8 or less. Then of course you have people who think the reviews are just fine and get into a Flame War against those who bash the magazine.
• The whole trope was rather beautifully summed up in an advertising tagline for Glenn Beck's show on the Fox News Channel.
  "Love him, or hate him, you just can't miss him."
• User-friendly Linux distributions such as Ubuntu vs. "power" distros such as Gentoo or Slackware.
  • Ubuntu itself causes a bit of a broken base for the Debian crowd: should Debian be credited more or would that tarnish Debian's reputation as rock solid? And then there's Canonical's recent UI antics, like rearranging buttons on the title bar or nuking the system tray notification area(the fact that they give the latter drifting from Microsoft's original vision as one of their reasons doesn't help). And then there's the the debate over whether GNU's insistence on "GNU/Linux" is mere egotism or justified.
• The Great Editor War, a long and epic battle between the users of Emacs and Vi. The battle between these two programming editors has gone on longer than the Mac vs. PC debate. The rivalry has long been joked about: even the normally bitter Richard Stallman has poked fun at the debate, declaring himself head of the "Church of Emacs" declaring war on the "Cult of Vi."
• Napoleon lost a lot of admirers when he crowned himself Emperor, while also gaining new ones who had felt threatened by the prospect of democracy in France - making this trope, at least, Older Than Radio.
• A Fanwork Ban can sometimes start one of these, between fans who support the author's decision and fans who lambast the author and/or defy the ban.
• Hero Factory vs Bionicle, since the former is a replacement for the latter.
  • As far as their basic story concepts and plotlines go, at least. The Hero Factory sets seem to have been received well enough, especially the 2.0 figures.
  • And, oh, on a larger scale, there is the pro-Bionicle/Hero Factory and anti-Bionicle/Hero Factory "debate". Certain older members of the LEGO community seem to utterly hate these essentially action figure lines (and sometimes the people that like them as well), while their fans just want to be left alone to enjoy what they like.
  • With regards to the BIONICLE story, there is that ever-resurfacing argument over which "era" was best. Nostalgic fans tend to view the original saga-trilogy of 2001-2002-2003 as the most defining age, while others insist that the quasi-spiritualism made it cheesy, the stereotyped characters made it uninspired and the Strictly Formula plots just made it stagnate.
    
    The 2004 Metru Nui era is when the biggest They Changed It, Now It Sucks shift took place — from a tropical island with lovable tribal people to a futuristic, high-tech city where angst and corruption abounded. The revelation that this was meant to be the "true" theme of BIONICLE turned many people away, but others liked it for its sudden avalanche of world-building and for the story being a bit more character-driven. 2005 isn't that popular, though.
    
    The post-2005 story is both hailed and hated for its dark tone, focus on intense sci-fi action and the tension-filled atmosphere, likewise for its subversive nature regarding some worn-out clichés of past years (which was often invoked by the characters in-story).
    
    Also, the latent Earth Drift tendencies of the later stories, organic characters replacing the biomechanical ones, is a heavily frowned-upon aspect for the older fans. Though, whether they remember or not, this has been part of the story since the beginning that just got more focus as the mysteries unveiled. Meanwhile, fan fiction writers at least now had semi-canon grounds for doing all kinds of things with these new, organic characters.
    • Related to the last point, the writer-enforced No Hugging, No Kissing rule is a frequently argued-over topic of the fandom.
  • Toy-wise, there was always someone complaining that the diminishing of action features made the figures boring, often going as far as to say "dumbed down", but others liked the improved articulation and the easier, faster construction.
  • Of the franchise's two main multi-console licensed games, the second, BIONICLE Heroes divides the fandom. On one hand, it's praised for its scope, straightforwardness, varied environments, the characters' unique special abilities, for being a decent time-killer, and for not being as horrible as the first. On the other, it's hated for not following canon, turning the characters into jokes completely unrelated to how they're featured in the story, and for being far too easy and monotone.
  • Another recurring topic of interest is the way the Big Bad was eventually defeated — shoving his head into an oncoming planetoid. Some are adamant that's it's ironic in its simplicity, for finishing off such a developed villain notorious for his inextricable plans in such a casual way, others say it was just plain anticlimactic, too sudden and mundane, and not near worth waiting 9+ years for.
  • There are, of course, the web serials, which either granted the writer the all-too-needed freedom to explore and develop the universe without the bounds of having to promote toys, or just gave him an excuse to write his own tacked-together crowd-pleasing fanfiction into canon material, and kill off whichever character he found challenging to make interesting.
  • The art of Stuart Sayger, who did the artwork for the '06-'07 comics and for a story in one of the later graphic novels, seems to have an equal share of lovers and loathers, as some greeted his style as a welcome and refreshing new take on the BIONICLE world, but others felt it was too different, and unsuitable for the theme's complex, robotic character designs. One thing they all agree on is that it was rarely ever not Off Model.
  • One of the most divisive sets is the titan-sized Toa Mata Nui◊. Fans (those that could get it at least) are of two minds about the figure. Some see it as one of the best large-size sets of the whole franchise, with a unique and complicated construction, and praise it for giving Mata Nui the sword he had in The Movie. Others regard it as a sub-par follow-up to the previous year's well-received titan Takanuva, with a poor design, messy color scheme, bad proportions, and hate it for being wildly Off Model (even the sword) and for not fitting into the established scale of the figures. One thing they all like, though, is that it has a golden Mask of Life.
  • Another increasingly widening break is that which rests between those fans that want to bring the franchise back and those who think it would be a bad idea. Much of the former crowd is made up of Fan Dumb, with the "anti-revivalists" often being more reasonable in their position, as they realize that, with all the similar but newer LEGO Themes (Hero Factory, Ninjago, Legends Of Chima) adopting a much more Lighter and Softer approach, Bionicle's darker and complex story would probably only suffer if it was really brought back. Part of what makes this break so big is that a lot of the "pro" fans misinterpret the other side's position, thinking that they don't want to have Bionicle back, period.
• High schools in the Maitland area of NSW, you either like Grossmann or Maitland high, god help you if you attend All saint's or Rutherford high.
• There's also the infamous communists. There's the Marxists, the Marxist-Lenninists (who are usually just Trotskyists in disguise), the Trotskyists, the Stalinists, the Maoists and the Socio-democrats. Talk about broken fanbase.
  • Amendments are necessary. 'Social Democracy' is a center-left ideology and not connected to Communism, any more than socialism is. Communism is not exclusively Marxist and neither are all left-leaning ideologies Communist. Also, the above mentioned groups are all breakaways from Marxism-Leninism, in that they all accept Marx, Engels and Lenin to have created the foundation for their ideologies. So, yes, broken fanbase, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
  • There is also the De Leonist/Leninist split with De Leonists believing that in order for communism to be achieved you need the working class to take power through mass action of class conscious workers organized democratically whereas Leninism advocates a vanguard of class conscious workers leading the rest of the population to communism.
• [adult swim]: Anime vs Comedy. And within the comedy fanbase, Animated vs. Live-Action...as well as Original Programming vs. Syndicated/Imported.
• Photographers and photography:
  • Canon or Nikon cameras: which is the absolute best?
  • Black and white vs colour: one side points to the impact of monochrome, and questions why any photographer worth the name would want to use anything else; the other side points to the fact that we see in colour, and that the technical issues with colour fidelity and dynamic range were resolved years ago.
• The recent hacks to the Steam Database caused quite an uproar. Not because of a lack of security, but because people did NOT overreact as they did with the infamous Sony Hack: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2226449
• Peanuts vs. Calvin And Hobbes. Which is very ironic, considering that Charles Schulz is one of Bill Watterson's main influences.
• Among smartphone users, Android vs IOS. That is all.
  • Android itself is a Broken Base many times over due to it running on so many phones,many with devoted fans.
• Talking about certain contestants on The Price Is Right that make bids that just says "I'm only making this bid to get attention", such as making a $2,000,000 bid, bids that are $420, or any bid whose last two numbers are 69. Fans of the show can't seem to decide whether or not the silly bids doesn't do anyone any harm or if it robs other people a spot on contestant's row because the idiot contestant wanted to get attention to themselves and not play the game seriously.
• Windows 8. Whereas certain previous versions of Windows got perfectly justified hate for performance and compatibility problems, 8 has none of those. However opinions on the radically updated UI are either "Greatest Windows Ever" or "The New Vista". No in between.
• World War 2 German weapons and vehicles. Hyper-advanced designs that paved the way for all modern military weapons, could beat anything the Allies made three ways to sunday and would have let the Nazis win the war had they just been produced enough/Hitler not been so crazy, or overly-complex and ridiculously expensive designs that while using some innovative features were not at all reliable and have been blown out of proportion by history. Expect arguments to veer into the territory of Artistic License - History, Unfortunate Implications and Godwin's Law.
• Two such instances pop up in the tenth chapter of the crossover between Lyrical Nanoha and Sailor Moon, White Devil Of The Moon, and surprisingly, they are unrelated to Nanoha and Fate getting together
  • Was Nanoha justified in harshly calling the Queen out on how she raised Serenity? Additionally, was this in character for Nanoha, who is more responsible than Usagi or Serenity, or was this contrary to someone who would "befriend" her enemies?
  • Vivio defeating Picoha (a character based off of Usagi's future daughter Chibi-Usa) and causing her and her alternate timeline to disappear was also a controversial action, especially since it was essentially killing her. Word Of God has clarified, however, that Picoha was the aggressor, attacking without stating her intent, and Vivio tried to defeat her non-lethally, without knowing what would happen to her.
• The constantly changing image of dinosaurs often sparks debates. Old-school dinosaur geeks that grew up in the Jurassic Park-era display a fierce harshness towards the scientifically now-accepted fact that, for example, raptors and T. rex would have been feathered or at least fuzzy, and criticize works that depict dinosaurs as realistic animals instead of reptilian movie-monsters. Meanwhile hard-core paleontology fans, knowing that the fossil evidence clearly supports their side, simply dismiss these people (often rudely). Even among them, though, there is a serious break when it comes to how close works about dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures) should stay to the known facts. Is it okay for non-scientific movies to still depict raptors with scales, or unacceptable? Should artists only draw what we can reliably infer from the fossils, or is wild speculation okay as long as it doesn't contradict the evidence? Arguments frequently occur because many paleontologists and general paleo-nerds treat their obsession as very Serious Business, and don't want mass-media misrepresenting their work.
• Analytic vs. continental philosophy.
• In tattoo circles, stick n' poke tattoos (tattoos done with a singular needle by people that aren't tattoo artists): are they unsanitary and the people that get them idiots, or are they an important part of tattoo culture and the people against them are snobs?
• The goto statement in programming languages. Does using it automatically make you a lazy/stingy/paranoid person with no regards for clean code? Or are the ones who avoid it "quiche eaters" who are just wannabes who can never be a real programmer and are idiotically forfeiting their job security to other "quiche eaters"?
• In psychiatry, should patients be treated with drugs or counseling? This one is particularly nasty, and is at the heart of the controversy over the DSM-V.