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Hey! Let me tell you something. I just got this show/movie/book, and it's awesome! You'll totally love it! It's got action and adventure and comedy and romance and it's really mature without ever losing its sense of fun. It's like it was made for you! I can't believe you haven't seen it yet! ...hey, where are you going?
Recommendations are strange things. If one person thinks you'd like something, you'll probably rush and check it out. Even if they're wrong, it can't be that bad, right?
Why is it that when twenty people say you'd like something, you'll just keep putting it off more and more?
This, my friends, is Hype Aversion: the specific avoidance of a work mainly because of how much you're told you'll like it.
There's a number of reasons for why this happens: Maybe it's a genre you're not so keen on. Maybe you're afraid that it's popular because it appeals to the Lowest Common Denominator. Maybe you're afraid that you won't enjoy it, and will have to deal with the fact that people you thought you knew don't really share your tastes, or that you felt lied to because they thought you would like it.. Maybe it's how, as more people and the Hollywood Hype Machine recommend something, the probability of meeting someone disconcertingly obsessed with it approaches one. Maybe the fandom in general has a certain level of squick to it that makes you a little uncomfortable. Maybe you just are sick of hearing about it because you accepted it wasn't your cup of tea in the first place, but it's very hard to ignore it because you keep hearing it everywhere.
It could be that you start out putting it off for later, but as more and more people bug you about it, you reject reading/watching/whatevering it multiple times and develop a habit of it. Maybe it's become a strange sort of anti-establishment pride that you refuse to check out something so many have liked. Bonus points if they express shock at how you've not seen it and peer-pressure you so much that you feel your independent thinking is getting seriously threatened. Maybe you're afraid that you'll like it too much, thus losing interest in what you previously enjoyed more. Maybe you feel you're not worthy. Maybe you're just that stubborn. It could also be because of this little thing called Reverse Psychology...
In any case, you might realize that yep, it's as great as everyone says... or at least not so bad that you'd be offended that people thought you would like it. On the other hand, you might end up a little let down — given all the hype, shouldn't Final Fantasy VII, Watchmen, and Baldur's Gate really be able to cure cancer, impotence or chronic bedwetting, give a determined, suicidal-averting reason to go on living, and guarantee one an automatic gate pass for Heaven?
Anything billed as the next incarnation of a popular work will get this.
Can lead to Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch if the aversion goes far enough. Of course, if one is able to get over such aversion, it can result in I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham.
Contrast Hype Backlash, where the hype doesn't prevent you from watching, but taints your reaction when you do. See Bile Fascination for the exact opposite of this trope. Related to the Hollywood Hype Machine, which starts the ball rolling for more mainstream successful ones.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Before Troper Tales were removed; there were several instances of people avoiding anime because there were so many examples of it on the trope pages.
- Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu absolutely exploded after only two or three episodes had been aired. It is physically impossible for any show on the planet to be as amazingly brilliant as the initial hype insisted Haruhi Suzumiya was.
- Possibly as a result of the above, any Kyoto Animation production is soon subject to Hype Aversion, even if it has nothing to do with Haruhi. Lucky Star suffered especially, as it shares many aspects of Haruhi — the Dancing Theme, the high-quality animation, Aya Hirano as the main character and a ton of Haruhi Shout Outs — yet has a completely different tone, subject and art style, which also put off the Haruhi fans that expected more of the same.
- Averted with the Full Metal Panic! sequels, which have not been subject to any such controversy, probably as they were made before Haruhi Suzumiya and aren't moe-focused. Munto mostly avoids it too, mainly by being unpopular.
- Death Note, another top anime of 2006. This was partly caused by all the fanboys who postulated its superiority over Code Geass, the third top show of '06, with similarly intellectual approach to plot.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion suffered from this both upon its initial popularity and with the wave of spinoff media that accompanied its tenth anniversary.
- Axis Powers Hetalia, bane of 4chan's /cm/ and Livejournal Roleplay.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which, according to some fans, would seem to be a divinely inspired life-changing experience.
- Naruto suffers from this, possibly due to being placed into the Animation Age Ghetto. Many people subconsciously associate the Cartoon Network preteen fanbase screaming "BELIEVE IT" and making misspelled posts with screen names like "Sakura39869395392" and actively refuse to watch the show.
- In fact, a similar phenomenon occurs with many other anime that's been broadcast on television. If a fanbase for a particular series becomes annoying (for example, if it is overrun with young fans, enjoys arguing amongst itself, or has some other annoying habit), the less likely a person will want to actually check out the series.
- Though that's usually almost as much a It's Popular, Now It Sucks thing.
- That the words '12-Year-Old Boy' have become a curse word to many fandoms is an example of how far this goes.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica is currently suffering from this; its explosive popularity rivals that of Haruhi, but many members of the fandom are treading lightly, largely because its reputation as a deconstruction has gotten out.
Card Games
Comic Books
Computer Programs
- TeX/LaTeX, a typesetting system used by scientists and other real men. If you ask for word processor recommendations on any forum, you can guarantee at least one response praising Te X for solving every problem ever, usually accompanied by a rant on how it's a crime against humanity to do text editing and typesetting in the same window.
- Innumerable programmers forgo learning languages like Java or C#, because they have been hyped as being easy to use. This is helped by the fact that, especially in the corporate world, programs are made "easy" for new and inexperienced users... and absolutely impossible for people at a level above that.
- On the different end of spectrum, things like Python, Haskell, Scala, all different variants of Lisp and ML, etc are often avoided just because they promise to solve some problems of more mainstream languages.
- Ruby isn't there yet but it's getting there.
- Ruby is definitely there, especially with those fucking rails.
- In the operating system world, we have both Macintosh and Linux, which have cultivated fan communities that stand on opposite ends of the tech-savvyness scale, but are just as devoted/obnoxious/pushy as each other. Their respective communities tend to treat them as a panacea that can cure every computer ill one might have, as well as making it seem as if one must drink gallons of kool-aid in order to fully appreciate them.
- It doesn't help that at just about any forum, if someone has a problem with Windows, no matter how minor, at least one of the "solutions" offered will be, "Buy a Mac," and/or "Install Linux."
- The Mozilla Firefox web browser. Considering the aggressive nature of its ad campaigns ("You're still not watching VHS... so why use an outdated browser?") and its overzealous, Hive Mind-like preaching that it is better than whatever browser you're using, most people are unable to judge it as an Internet browser.
- Some sites would often force you or constantly annoy you to get Firefox, opening on a naggy "ARE YOU INSANE?! GET FIREFOX!" message every time you visit, or just downright blocking or barely functioning for any other browser that isn't Firefox until you get said browser. There are even some sites which use "It works with Firefox!" as an excuse for their instability and incompatibility with other browsers.
- This was pre-dated by the "Best Viewed With" campaigns for Netscape, Firefox's predecessor, and Internet Explorer which tore up the internet in the 90s.
- Google Chrome is rapidly becoming the new Firefox in this respect.
- Actually, this should apply to any web browser that's not Internet Explorer 6.
- Justified as IE6 has long needed to be put out to pasture. You're on your own with browser choices though.
- The Eclipse editor, which is supposed to solve all programming problems and support every possible language, compiler, external tool, etc. When it does not, you can always stop whatever you were working on and write your own plugin to do so.
- There's also the Emacs vs. vi wars. They were larger in the 90s, but people still use EMACS and vim
Fandom
Film
Literature
- Harry Potter
- The Mass Culture Critique, a high-art manifesto published in the mid-20th century, declared that if something was popular, it couldn't be any good.
- His Dark Materials
- The Discworld series.
- Twilight. Apparently it's gotten so bad people have been attacked for not liking the series.
- Twilight is probably the only series to have a Hatedom that negatively hypes the series so much that it creates anti-Hype Backlash causing more people to read it out of spite for the hatedom adding more ranks to the Fan Dumb which propagates normal hype backlash and hatedom which... ad nauseum.
- Not necessarily. The Hatedom pushed someone to read the books in spite only to find that, actually, the Hatedom have a point.
- Either way, the Hatedom still caused more people to read the books, leading to a sort of inverse of Hype Aversion.
- In nonfiction, books like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense Of Food tend to get pushed very, very hard in certain circles.
- Anything Douglas Coupland, but especially Generation X and Microserfs.
- Lord of the Rings.
- Wheel of Time, even when some of it is hatred of the more recent books.
- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
- Everything and anything written by Stephen King.
- Any high-brow "intellectual" literature. Mark Twain defined a classic as a book that everybody knew about, but no one had ever read.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Your friends can't wait until you get through all five densely-populated Door Stoppers so that they can discuss them with you. Even if you're a fan of the genre, this is quite a commitment.
- Some react this way at To Kill a Mockingbird.
Live Action TV
- Arrested Development
- Any production by Mutant Enemy, be it Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly or Dollhouse.
- Pushing Daisies
- Lost is a great example because, of course, the show is impossible to follow if you miss so much as 30 seconds. Generally speaking, the shorter something is, the less excuse you have for escaping it.
- Spoofed in an episode of The Soup, in which a Joel McHale states that not only is the viewer missing out by not watching Lost, but that now, its too late. He then proceeds to display a fast-forward clip of various aspects, plot twists, characters, Mind Screws, and ends with the suggestion to watch something "more your speed, like Freddie."
- Blame Continuity Lockout for this.
- It also suffers from traditional Hype Aversion. It's been described by critics as "The greatest story of our generation." That's pretty heavy.
- Whatever the current "sooooo much better than Star Trek" sci-fi show is. Past examples include Babylon 5, Andromeda, Farscape, and Firefly; the current officeholder is Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined). These shows tend to be (a) genuinely great, (b) nowhere near as all-consumingly brilliant as their fandoms think, and (c) constant victims of Screwed by the Network.
- Star Trek due to the amount of Monomaniacs obsessively praising the show endlessly, and the other Fan Dumb.
- The list would not be complete without some mention of The Sopranos, which all critics are required to praise above all other products of human creativity in existence. A bumper film on Saturday Night Live was made up of increasingly hyperbolic Soprano reviews, climaxing with an orgasmic cry of "Sopranos!"
- The Wire.It doesn't help that critics talk about it as if it is the finest accomplishment in any Art form ever
- Mad Men. From the critical ravings about it you'd think it not only is the finest achievement in all human history and a possible cure for cancer, but anyone who may even think about not liking this show is implied to be simply incapable of recognizing quality and a complete moron to boot. Maybe it would be best to not bother watching to avoid disappointment because of the hype is one line of thinking. And god help you if you see it and don't like it.
- Doctor Who. Especially in the UK, where it's one of those 'National Institution' shows. Colin Baker raised an interesting point on a 40th anniversary documentary that people born from the mid-80s to the mid-00s didn't have their own 'Doctor' (TV movie excepted), so they might not be as endeared to the show as others older and younger are.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus.
- Friday Night Lights, as spoofed by David Spade: "Why is it every critic loves Friday Night Lights, and you're still not watching? We don't get it. What are you, a moron? Don't tell me you're watching American Idol. I hate to tell you, but you sound like an idiot when you talk about that show. It's for two-year-olds. Who do we have to blow to get you to watch Friday Night Lights? Watch it already. Fuck you."
- Glee.
- The Big Bang Theory. The show got most of its hype from word of mouth, which might explain why it didn't get the best ratings until season 3.
- Heroes. Especially brutal if you start with the newest episode on TV. Cause nahhhhoo, you've gotta start from the beginning, and stay there.
- Have we mentioned Monty Python's Flying Circus?
- Supernatural
- A rare example of this happening before the work in question premiered was Central Park West. With millions of dollars spent on this Primetime Soap Opera, CBS hyped it by continually assaulting viewers with advertisements for the show. The commercials promised that the series would totally change the landscape of television by introducing racy subject matter. There were banner ads on almost every bus in the United States. Multi-page advertorial sections in entertainment trade magazines showcased the cast members and talked about the adult nature of the program. Yet, when it premiered, viewers were reportedly so incensed at being continually hounded by ads for the show that they didn't bother to watch it, which led to it getting trounced in the ratings by Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210.
- Homicide:Life on The Street - When it first debuted,critics were falling all over Themselves to praise it and its daring methods of Storytelling,framing and Characterization.Audiences later switched to NYPD Blue despite the best efforts of the Network (Increasingly more Marketing friendly episodes) and the Writers (Constantly improving Episodes and adding new more daring storylines)
- And don't forget Monty Python's Flying Circus.
- Community is starting to get this, as shown here, and here.
- How has Monk not been mentioned here before now? While one can, with adequate information and education, sympathize with people who have to deal with very real and very active disorders (of which phobia for germs, such as what the titular character contends with every episode, is just one) in their daily living, not everyone who watches this series at least once or twice will find the detective's rather eccentric quirks funny so much as they will find it utterly annoying. And that annoyance is bound to be multiplied by the show's fans who act astonished when you tell them you're just not interested in the show, as though you've committed a capital crime.
Music
- There are entire communities of music lovers out there who believe Led Zeppelin's music as a whole and with no exceptions to be the poster boy of this trope, because to them, Led Zeppelin is the least talented, most pretentious, most overhyped band in the history of modern music. Especially "Stairway to Heaven."
- "Stairway to Heaven" is probably the biggest musical example of this. But "Smoke on the Water" and "Free Bird" are both getting there. If you're in a place where a band plays and you can ask them to play a specific title... don't choose one of these.
- The Beatles. Yeah, they revolutionized pop music, but for some people they're just too popular to be good. It's not understood how decades of people adoring them, hundreds of bands wanting to be The Next One of Them, imitations, homages, and covers could come about if "They're just a bunch of hyped up, pre-N*Sync pretty boys who didn't do anything different from what all the other druggy hippies did back then."
- The Jonas Brothers. It doesn't help that there are legions of fangirls who worship the Jonas Brothers and despise everyone who doesn't. And, in the same vein, Hannah Montana.
- And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, My Chemical Romance fans. Who usually tend to hate Miley Cyrus/Jonas Brothers with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.
- Tom Waits.
- Anything in the NME, the world's most hyperbolic music magazine, that has a tendency to gather up clusters of hot new indie bands and build them up so much that you know their music can't possibly be that good.
- Especially true during December/January, when the music press really goes OTT on 'The Bands You MUST See This Year!'.
- One starts to get suspicious after having read the magazine for over a year, and one realises that the bands being hyped up the same time the previous year are getting no coverage whatsoever.
- See also Kerrang!, which is pretty much the same, just with bands which are "more metal" than those in the NME.
- Metal Hammer, who frequently big up death metal and metalcore bands who ultimately all sound like they want to be Pantera. Special mention goes to the 'thrash revival' a few years ago. Very few of the bands were actually thrash and most of them were quickly forgotten.
- Animal Collective, Wavves, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, The Gaslight Anthem, Los Campesinos!, Jay Reatard, Fleet Foxes and various other bands that Pitchfork Media heaps breathless praise on.
- Which is rather unfortunate when you consider that many people avoided or hated albums like Kid A by Radiohead and Since I Left You by The Avalanches simply because Pitchfork liked them, even though everyone else did, too.
- Eminem, who certainly has skill, but many listeners feel he wouldn't be nearly as successful if he wasn't white, which taints the perception of non-listeners.
- Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."
- Vanilla Ice. 8.
- Phantom Regiment, the Drum Corp. Band nerds across America have seen their '08 show, why haven't you?
- It was difficult for anyone in the UK not to feel this about La Roux. The combination of the singer's trend-setting haircut, androgynous style, and the whole 'eighties electro nostalgia-trip meant that most of the music writers, fashion writers, and all the others in the Islington-centric journalist pack went on and on and on and on about them. As Charlie Brooker said on Newswipe: "In case you don't know who La Roux is; she's Jedward for people who don't like music".
- Lady Gaga.
- The difference there being that you can't escape her, even if you want to...
- This very website has probably discouraged many a would-be fan with certain overhyped posters overstating her brilliance.
- Justin Bieber.
- Radiohead.
- Nicki Minaj. The singles all over the radio didn't help...
- A combination of this, Its Popular Now it Sucks and Fan Dumb has led to otherwise great Heavy Metal albums to get poor review scores from members of Metal-Archives.com
- One of the reasons why Moby Grape failed to make an impact on the market. Somebody (either the record company, the band's Svengali manager Matthew Katz or both) thought it would be a good idea to issue 85% of the band's first album as a group or singles in just a month, overexposing the band.
- K-Pop music
- R&B in general. It's gotten to the point where the best way to get into the music industry is to be a black guy with [1].
- U2. Jesus, U2. Doesn't help that Bono is essentially The Scrappy.
- Vocaloid, especially Hatsune Miku. When you've got a rabid Vocal(oid) Minority that treats a character like the Second Coming, and said character's image gets splashed all over the place, Hype Aversion is pretty much assured.
- Rush
Theatre
Video Games
- Pick an MMO. Any MMO.
- The MMO format itself. It can be argued that there are plenty of valid reasons for MMO-aversion. It's just that the hype makes them seem all the more insidious.
- Grim Fandango
- Final Fantasy gets this a lot, especially when its combined with the Unpleasable Fanbase and Hype Backlash.
- So does any game billed to be the next Final Fantasy. (See Xenosaga.)
- Grand Theft Auto IV
- Portal, due to It's Popular, Now It Sucks, Memetic Mutation, the Companion Cube, the Still Alive song, highly positive reviews across the board, Zero Punctuation actually praising it, being a Valve game... really, the list could go on and on.
- Super Mario Galaxy had such an ungodly amount of hype and praise when it was first released that you were simply not allowed to deem as it anything less than TEN OUT OF TEN GAME OF THE YEAR.
- And now the sequel got the same amount of hype when it was released.
- Any game that has any controversy attached to it or wasn't released for any particular reason in any specific realm. Persona 2: Innocent Sin is a particularly prominent example.
- Just because you like listening to AC/DC or QoTSA, doesn't mean you want to play them on a computer game (or even on a real guitar for that matter)
- The same could be said about Bemani games, although it's more about the choice of music than anything.
- The World Ends with You has quickly turned into a mixture of this and Hype Backlash, especially at GameFAQs. Expect recommendation topics to be swarmed with fans that may likely bring up the point that this is a new game that needs all possible support. Some fans might go into holier than thou mode if anyone makes any kind of mention relating to disappointment with the game, which results in some Fan Haters coming in and fanning the Flame War.
- Games on Facebook. Partly justified in that you can only see so many stories about them on your news feed before you get tired of them, and many of them have links to phishing and various scams. Though to be fair, you can always hide news stories from specific Facebook apps, and forget they even exist.
- Except it becomes an ongoing process of hiding similar games, as there is Farmtown, Farmville, Farmzoo, Fram-etc... Then those games sometimes circumvent the "hide" option by allowing users to post pictures of their farms to their photo album, and you can't hide "[Person] has posted some pictures from their Farm in Farmville!"
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Likely not helped by the media hyping it up as the biggest videogame launch ever, if not since Grand Theft Auto IV. On the day of its launch, practically two thirds of the front page of videogame newsblog site Kotaku was dedicated to articles about Modern Warfare 2.
- Black Ops has gone the same way. No doubt Modern Warfare 3 will also.
- Example where the hype actually got the game cancelled: Duke Nukem Forever. The devs spent so long to try to make a game that could possibly live up to the decade of hype, the studio shut down.
- According to the October issue of Game Informer DNF has been uncanceled and has been taken up by Gearbox Studios after 12 years of Development Hell.
- As of 2011, DNF has been finally released and, to put it simply, it wasn't as good as people hoped.
- Shadow of the Colossus, which looks fun, but it's a little off-putting that critics and militant fanboys claim it is the single greatest video game in the history of video games, bar none, game over, go home. Even TV Tropes itself is not immune; its entry once claimed that it is a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the entire Video Game medium. Really.
- Touhou gets quite a bit of aversion and Hype Backlash by (to its non-fans) the strange, sudden explosion of popularity on the video game/anime scene. People looking for fan art of unrelated games soon got sick of seeing the Touhou girls cosplaying as characters they're really looking for. Roleplayers got sick of the Touhou flood in multifandom games. Then some of the fans just make it worse.
- Valkyria Chronicles, if you're into feminist philosophy and video games. Fans call Alicia a crowning achievement in progressive portrayals of female characters; disagreeing is a good way to start a flame war. Depending on where you go to discuss that kind of issue, it's easy for people to get turned off of the franchise just because of the associated Fan Dumb.
- Minecraft. The amount of Fan Dumb who endlessly praise it and go onto all gaming channels and flood the comments section with requests/demands for them to do more minecraft, as well as how there are people saying that Second Life is a ripoff of Minecraft...
- The mountain of hype Skyrim received immediately before and for weeks after its release can only be described as "monumental" - so it comes as no surprise that some people are tired of hearing almost nothing but rave reviews about how awesome it is.
- Not to mention the "arrow in the knee" jokes, which were initially made in gaming-related Youtube videos, whether they were Skyrim-related or not, and are now constantly referenced everywhere in general. Basically, it's the new "the cake is a lie".
- "Dark Souls" on British videogaming site Gamecentral. As of January 2012, there are still several letters being submitted daily to the site's Inbox section orgasming over the game's brilliance. Bear in mind that Dark Souls was released in the UK in October 2011.
Web Original
- The Image Board 4chan pretty much lives off this, particularly the Video Games (/v/) and Anime (/a/) boards. A good game/anime will become very popular with 4channers, it'll get discussed a lot, and people become more and more sick of it, at which point trolls strike, talking about how horrible it is. This negative opinion influences the Anonymous contributors, until eventually it becomes genuine. Final Fantasy VII suffered to the point where even posting Tifa Rule 34 gets you ridiculed.
- On that note, 4chan's own reputation precedes it, somewhat in thanks to a Fox news report that likened them with terrorists. *Footage of a van exploding*
- On the more quiet Comics & Cartoons (/co/) board it usually goes through the following stages:
1. Omg, "Show X"'s release is announced! "Show X" is win.
2. Omg, "Show X"'s trailer was released today! "Show X" is fail.
3. Omg, "Show X" will be finally released today! I can't wait!
4. (pause)
5. "Show X" was win / "Show X" was fail. Debates.
6. Let's post tens of topics related to "Show X".
7. We're sick of tens of topics related to "Show X".
8. If I see a "Show X" topic one more time!..
9. (pause)
10. Hey, what's "Show X"? Is it any good? :)
- The Music (/mu/) board also lives off of this. The longest running and most famous example being Neutral Milk Hotel.
- What do you think is more rare on /a/: a good thread about Bakemonogatari, or about Renkin San-kyuu Magical Pokaan? About Bakemonogatari, even as there are numerous threads about this show every possible day.
- TV Tropes. You gotta admit that somewhere out there, some people are getting tired of seeing links leading to this site in forums, webcomics, and various sites about the media, thinking that all of these sites are part of some campaign to assimilate everyone to a HiveMind-controlled state of Troperdom.
- The Giant In The Playground forums, in particular, have pretty much had it up to here with links to this site.
- Lots of people are. The default response to a TV Tropes links is "well, there goes the rest of my day..."
- There even one forumite whose profile reads "Do your part and join TV Tropes".
- And now you can find signatures reading "Do your part and don't quote TV Tropes today."
- Not helped when webcomic authors think just quoting TV Tropes is funny in itself.
- The gaming forum Neo GAF tends to provoke this with regards to anything that's perceived as not having done as well as it should have commercially or with anything from producers of the preceding. It's the only place where you're likely to come away feeling that a commercial flop that received mixed reviews might be a little overrated.
- Doctor Horribles Sing Along Blog.
- Social Networking sites in general. Myspace for being filled with Emos and Miley Cyrus Fan Girls, Facebook for being a constantly changing, confusing and unusable abomination, and of course Twitter, for being taken up by every news organization, TV Show, and D-list celebrity on earth.
- Zero Punctuation had this happen, there are people who refuse to see any of his reviews due to the massive Misaimed Fan Dumb who take his content way too seriously. Similar to the anime Hype Aversion, there were people who disliked Zero Punctuation merely because they disliked seeing his quote on so many pages, as fitting as they often were.
- Many also don't appreciate that he's all over the site whilst Charlie Brooker (who Zero Punctuation is basically doing one long impression of) remains relatively unknown outside the UK.
Web Comics
Western Animation
Other
- Everything iPod.
- In fact, portable media players in general.
- In fact, Apple products in general.
- The iPhone. Getting to number 1 on Time's Top 100 Inventions list over more practical and beneficial inventions does that to products.
- Android.
- Tabletop game fans seem particularly prone to this, from Dungeons & Dragons to Warhammer. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Warhammer: Age of Conflict, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War have all been met by backlashes from the established communities.
- And don't get us started on Traveller.
- Partially justified as the time, money, and expense to find people to play with and even get started on a PnP RPG is quite high. New players usually don't have that kind of resources and existing players usually have spent large amounts of all that they would like to see their purchases and energy justified as 'right'.
- Not to mention you can't enjoy them alone, which means if you don't know anyone else who's into the game you're invested in, well, it can lead to bitterly lashing out at the more widely-played games.
- Live theatre example — at the bigger Fringe Festivals in Canada, any production by T.J. Dawe gets a lot of this.
- Any political candidate can strike you with this, should you run into a too fervent supporter. The king of this online would be Ron Paul.
- Indeed, there's a history of rabid fandoms hyping up a candidate only to abandon him/her in the primaries in favor of somebody more
weaksauce electable. Ron Paul filled this role in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, as Howard Dean did four years earlier.
- Alfa Romeo. The greatest cars in the world apparently. As they said on Top Gear, "you can't be a petrolhead unless you've owned one". Okaaaay.
- To be fair, the boys on Top Gear seem to be aware of the fact that Alfa Romeos also have a reputation of being, well, crap. They're not saying Alfa Romeo is good - they're saying it's fun!
- What they're really saying is that you can't be a petrolhead unless you've owned a car that needs fixing every week, and you do the repairs yourself. Alfas do this while often being sporty, good looking, and not too expensive.
- Not necessarily all those at once.
- Religions. We shall limit the discussion to the observation that there are portions of the population who find themselves turned off from various philosophies, due to the nature of the personalities who are often involved.
- Up to and including the "no religion" category.
- Leo Tolstoy once said that everything supported by a large number of people would turn him off automatically.
- Twitter, and most other social networking sites in the Myspace tradition.
- Alcohol with some people. Sex, to a lesser extent.
- Marijuana while we're at it, especially on the topic of legalization.
- Drugs are a given, but it's kind of humorous to think of a conversation going: "Sex is so good! You should try some right now!" "No! Just for that, I'll never ever have sex, and I wouldn't enjoy it even if you made me!"
- Clearly you've never met any asexuals. There's even a special term, "repulsed asexual," for someone who believes exactly this (minus the "just for that" part)
- Hype Aversion is about being ill at ease with a concept because other people, or indeed, society as a whole, seems obsessed by it. Sex definitely counts.
- Modern media's obsession with injecting sexuality into everything is definitely to blame. There's nothing wrong with being sexually curious or open about it, but when food, cars, electronics, and even furniture are given the "sexy" treatment, suddenly the whole concept of sex loses all meaning and becomes so oversaturated that any of its magic is utterly butchered in translation.
- Vegetarian diets. Many people are willing to entertain the notion of eating less meat, maybe transitioning toward a meatless diet, but are quickly turned off by the behavior of organized vegetarian groups, with their aggressive proselytizing, dubious science, and copy-paste activism.
- On that note, animal rights in general. The majority of people tend to agree that unnecessary animal cruelty is wrong on several levels, and they tend to agree with animal rights groups like PETA on major points. However, PETA is such an extreme group, most people refuse to listen to protesters at all.
- eBay. Messageboards on all its competitor sites, as well as its own, are full with people decrying "feeBay", "greedBay" and so on. The problem is, nobody uses these sites (unless it's a niche market specialist site) and everyone still uses eBay, even the ones who hang around the official forums to kvetch at it.
- The Internet in the mid-to-late 90s.
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