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Accentuate The Negative
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in the darkness and blind to the light, always pursuing vermin and never hunting noble game.
Henry Ward Beecher

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
Food critic Anton Ego, Ratatouille

The scene's about the characters, and it's a nice scene, but I'm not here to accentuate what's nice.
D. R. McLeod, Agony Booth recaps, Hulk (2003)

Most of us love a good grumble. It's cathartic to whine and complain for a bit and get things off our chests. Problem is, "polite society" has a low tolerance level for this kind of thing, and someone who verbalizes their real thoughts on a lousy situation is likely to be frowned upon and labeled a misery/grouch/Emo Teen relatively quickly. For example, the "correct" answer to the question "How are you?" is either "Fine, thank you," or "Pretty good. And you?" Even if your house exploded in a freak accident that morning, you were flattened by a runaway horse and then fired for coming into work covered in hoofprints.

So when people come across a situation where resentment can be voiced, it's not all that surprising when they take full advantage of it. Whether it's online, in print, or among close friends and family, there's always a sense of relief when you're able to voice that irksome thing that's been bugging you for the past week.

However, sometimes this can be taken to an extreme. We can get so carried away with the freedom of voicing the things that annoy us that we completely forget to even mention the things that we actively enjoy. It's not that we're setting out to be a Jerkass or as negative as possible — it's just that we take the good things in life so much for granted that we don't see fit to talk about them... and come across as a pessimist as a result.

As society becomes more and more cynical (although, in face-to-face interaction, general grouching is still pretty unacceptable) this meta-trope is becoming common across the board, manifesting itself in a number of different ways:
  • Harmony Is Boring: Conflict is the driving force of most plots. Therefore, stories tend to focus on the unpleasant parts of life, be it divorce, murder, or the Apocalypse. Stories about how nice life is and how good it is to be alive are usually reserved for children — and generally pretty young children at that. Not that life-affirming morals are in short supply, it's just that they tend to be reached after three hundred pages of hardship and heartbreak, at which point the reader/viewer is not particularly inclined to believe them.
  • Everyone Is Messed Up: See that well-adjusted character over there? Don't expect it to last. There's a reason that therapists are in short supply in many stories, both because of the assumption that True Art Is Angsty, and the belief conflicted characters are more interesting — after all, Good Is Boring. "Pure" heroes, like the Knight In Shining Armor, are seen as largely generic and similar to each other (and therefore are usually under-represented), while dark pasts and questionable morals make villains and anti-heroes distinct and recognizable.
  • Negative Nellie: An online personality found on message boards. Complains constantly about the flaws in a show or book, achieved record time for plot-hole spotting and just will not let that episode that everyone pretends never happened be forgotten. Yet strangely enough, these are rarely the members who terrorise the newbies, or the board's resident Rottweiler. They leave that to the resident Pesci. Actually, they're pretty friendly, usually long-standing members whose grumbling is met with amused tolerance by everyone else. Their temper is reserved for their least favourite parts of their favourite show.
  • Snark Media: The media's outright manifestation of this trope, particularly prevalent in the U.K. From Grumpy Old Men to "The Top 100 Songs We Love To Hate" to acerbic commentaries by Jerkass celebrities, there's a modern trend for publicising and poking fun at everything irritating in the world, taking advantage of all the dark humour and guilty pleasure that can be derived from snarling at that song/show/person that just drives everyone nuts. Sometimes counteracted by more upbeat equivalents ("The Nation's Favourite Drama/Comedy/Songs/etc."), but not only is the negative version more common, it's usually more popular as well.
  • Annoyed Webmaster.com: The website version of Snark Media, although it's usually cheerfully open about its cynicism and self-deprecating to boot. Will make fun of the things it likes, never mind the bad stuff.

Often, if an audience, broadcaster or forum member is challenged about their complaints (e.g. "Do you even like this show?") they'll be genuinely surprised. Of course they like it! Why would they bother commenting at all on it if they didn't? It's just that grousing about Development Hell, Creator Breakdown or Dis Continuity is much more fun than counting your blessings — after all, you'd only be Preaching To The Choir... but then, sometimes you're doing that anyway.
Examples:

  • Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad. While it does contain constructive criticism, the site absolutely hates the comics it reviews and also brags about hating the entire concept of a webcomic; it's not affectionate or fannish in the least. Is it horrible or hilarious? You decide!
  • Featured as a plot point in webcomic Friendly Hostility. Collin's best friend, Fox, is also his boyfriend...which means that when Fox screws up, or the relationship hits a rocky patch, misanthropic Collin doesn't really have anyone he can talk to about it. When he befriends Arath, he takes full advantage of the opportunity to unload some of his grudges and doubts about the relationship. Unfortunately, Collin takes much of his usually-good love affair for granted, and therefore doesn't really mention the nice things about his boyfriend. Result? Arath begins to believe that Collin's boyfriend is a useless jerk who mistreats his partner.
  • The books Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit? (Volumes I and II!) exemplify the trend in the British media for complaining about anything and everything.
    • There's also Crap Towns and Crap Towns II, which are Exactly What It Says On The Tin — someone on the radio pointed out that this is the only country where not only would a book called Crap Towns make bestseller lists, but they'd release Crap Towns II because so many people complained that their town wasn't included in the first volume.
  • The writer of It Is Just You, Everything's Not Shit bravely attempted to counteract these books, listing all that the author believed was nice in the world. Rather worryingly, it's a much shorter book.
  • Stephen Fry put Room 101 itself into Room 101 in one of his appearances on the show, citing his reasoning that there was no need to have entire shows and books dedicated to everything "vile" in the world and asking "Why can't we have Room Fluffy?" A brief section followed with Fry reporting on his favourite things in life — such as libraries.
  • Interestingly enough, Stephen Fry now hosts QI, a show dedicated to "quite interesting" facts (or sometimes factoids) which could be described as a kind of intellectual Room Fluffy. The team behind QI now also make a radio show named The Museum of Curiosity, into which people are literally able to put a selection of their favourite things.
  • Grumpy Old Men takes full advantage of the assumed tetchiness of the middle-aged-U.K.-male to elaborate on why the modern world is an awful one. Mind you, it keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek as it does so.
  • Videogame Recaps appears fully aware of this trope, to the point that they have a disclaimer reassuring readers that they do like the games they review, it's just that they also enjoy applying copious amounts of sarcasm to them as well.
  • In contrast, most fans enjoy MST3K for its idealistic and fun atmosphere, despite the central tenet being one of mocking, sometimes quite brutally, bad movies. The fact that it is of such quality means that it rarely goes from "funny-mean" to just "mean", though it became more common to do so in later seasons.
  • Two words: Encyclopedia Dramatica (very NSFW and very offensive). Every subculture, TV show, film, and genre of music is somehow deemed "retarded," "shitty," or their favorite insult of all, "gay." Other than schadenfreude, these gentlemen don't enjoy anything. However, if you're looking for details on an internet meme, you'll find it there. Essentially a Wiki maintained by the residents of 4chan, particularly /b/.
    • As well, they like to take random members of art-based websites such as DeviantART and write every horrible and nasty thing they can think of about them. This opens a gateway to a flood of trolling on the victim's art page, which causes drama if the victim reacts, which then makes the victim's article on ED even bigger because of the drama.
    • ED's rival, Uncyclopedia, is more like a parody version of Wikipedia, and the humor is more often flat-out crazy than insulting. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with the Portuguese version, which, besides some actual parodic articles and articles on fads, follows the ED formula of bashing anything in sight and lots of NSFW images.
    • The only page that This troper has seen in ED that actually praises it's topic is the one about John Solomon, almost definitely for his equal hatefulness towards the subjects he talks about. They also like House, The Colbert Report, The Young Ones, Captain Falcon, Zero Punctuation and oddly, Star Trek Voyager.
  • The biggest reason to watch Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation reviews is to listen to a Mean Brit talk very fast about games he hates. There are some games he enjoys unreservedly, like Portal and Psychonauts. With Portal, he showed mild shock and disgust with himself for loving it so completely, and his Psychonauts review consisted of 40% insulting the people who didn't buy it, 20% bashing Halo and anyone that plays it, 20% complaining that there aren't more original intellectual properties like this, and 20% actual praise. Not so surprisingly, he is a frequenter of the Something Awful boards.
  • Something Awful. The name pretty much describes their reaction to their subjects. Mind you, when they do like something, they won't stop praising it. It's... unnerving.
  • Portal of Evil. It seems to have started off as a list of "weird" things on the Internet, but has evolved to the point where "If it is listed, we hate it."
  • H.L. Mencken. The man hated everything about America, his columns bemoaning all the evils that plagued the United States in the 20s and 30s and tearing apart every politician he could get his hands on. Particularly notable is the fact that he predicted and answered the probable question:
    Question: If you find so much worthy of ridicule in America, then why do you live here?
    Answer: Why do men go to zoos?
  • Dorothy Parker did this a lot as part of her "Constant Reader" persona. How hardass was she? She excoriated Winnie the Pooh. Famous quote: "And it is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House At Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
  • Robert Crumb. Not just his comics; he's reportedly like that in real life. Read the R. Crumb Handbook, more specifically, the section titled "The Litany of Hate".
  • 4chan. 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Something Awful share about 60% of the same userbase, and violently hate each other. It's a "fun" situation.
  • The Roman Historian Tacitus utterly refused to write anything good about the Emperor Nero, and made a point of assuring us that any good thing Nero did was for the wrong reasons.
  • The Greek playwright Aristophanes was pretty fond of this, too, ruthlessly satirizing the philosophers and politicians of his day. The Clouds contains his ideas about Socrates.
    • Better yet, there's The Knights. Possibly one of the most vicious pieces of political satire ever written, and despite being almost two and a half millennia old, surprisingly relevant.
  • The Comics Curmudgeon, as expected with a name like that. Posts daily to rip on the newspaper funnies. Notable in that as rough as it is on comics as a whole, it has managed to establish good relationships with the creators of many of these comics, especially Slylock Fox. Also notable in that it occasionally does praise elements of the comics that it normally mocks. Occasionally.
  • Much of the stand-up comedy by comedians like George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope, Dennis Leary, Bill Maher, Lewis Black, and David Cross, among others. They're all observational comedians, and saying the world is lovely wouldn't be particularly funny, would it?
  • Realising that reviews tearing a film apart are more entertaining to read than those full of praise, Roger Ebert published a book of them called I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. The title was from his review of North. There's a sequel, Your Movie Sucks, titled after the closing line from his review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. (In fairness, he also has a book of essays called The Great Movies that praises his favorite classics.)
  • Screw These Comics was a website that "reviewed" (read: tore to shreds) Sprite Comics. The site shut itself down, however, after the "reviews" degenerated from actual criticism to the reviewer characters cursing each other out, cursing the comics out, and generally just throwing around the word "faggot" like it was going out of style. Attempts to revive the style have been short-lived, at best.
  • Over the years, Scans Daily has become somewhat infamous for this kind of behavior. So much so that the guy who wrote this article attributes Scans Daily as a major cause of the recent spike in comics Hatedom.
    • It should be noted, that most of comic fandom, with the exception of Comic Bloc, falls under this trope. It's a side effect of comics being a very mixed bag, having some really good stories and fascinating characters, but having constant shakeups and crises and characters constantly dying and being resurrected and so many different writers and artists leads to a full spectrum of bad and good. Comic fans are cynical by nature from being jerked around a lot. S_D is just a mild example of this, cuz there's lots of love too, and it's generally a good place to crack jokes and debate. Now, DC Boards...
  • Mr. Cranky.
  • Plenty of radical feminist critiques of popular culture can be more than a little... caustic. Take A Rapist's View of the World: Joss Whedon and Firefly, for example, in which the author essentially accuses Firefly of being a series of forty-five minute infomercials for rape. In detail.
    • That essay is a joke... right? Please tell me it's a joke.
  • When humor columnist Dave Barry issued his "bad song survey," the idea of which was to ask his readers to vote for the worst song of all time, he received a greater amount of reader mail than ever before (the winner, incidentally, was "MacArthur Park"). The result of this was his writing and publishing of a book entitled Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, which consists entirely of him bashing songs he hates.
  • The amount of Take Thats in TV Tropes! OH NOES!
    • The Just Bugs Me as well. Thankfully they are contained in their own little world.
    • This troper has noticed that many of the examples provided on the Narm page are rather mean-spirited.
    • Actually, almost every entry on TV Tropes appears to be a mild version of this, since somewhat snarky articles are preferred for their entertainment value. Thus necessitating the Tropes Are Not Bad amd Justifying Edit warnings.
  • Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd is all about this. He usually reviews games that are legitimately bad, and the AVGN is stated to be a character.
  • Statler and Waldorf think that just when you think this page is terrible, something wonderful happens... it ends!
  • The Nostalgia Critic hates pretty much everything he reviews. Like the Angry Video Game Nerd, however, the Nostalgia Critic is simply a character and the movies and shows he reviews are genuinely bad. On the flip side of the coin, he's made tributes to Double Dare and Drew Struzan, and his Top 11 lists are generally positive.
    • His overly grouchy attitude is lampshaded during many of the reviews, but the most prominent example would be when he broke down in tears over failing to find it in his bitter angry heart to rip on Follow That Bird.
  • Almost every single article in the British newspaper the Daily Mail, popularly known, among other nicknames, as "the Daily Hate". This may or may not be a 1984 reference.
  • Penny Arcade thrives on this trope but they also are able to be very funny when heaping unmitigated praise on something.
  • John "K" Kricfalusi, creatore of Ren & Stimpy, pretty much hates almost any cartoon airing today that isn't his.
  • The film Batman and Robin is a definite victim of this. People that have never even seen the film (or watched it with the express purpose of hating it) love to just crap on it and pretend it's the absolute worst thing in existence. Is it any worse than any other nine digit budget turkey? Not really, no.

Professional Wrestling
  • Wrestle Crap's slogan is, "The worst in wrestling is here!" and boy, do they live up to it. The tone varies by subject, from light-hearted jabbing to completely hateful ranting, but, with the exception of the Rewriting The Book section, it's always negative. Despite their negativity (or perhaps because of the good humor they show about it most of the time), they've managed to gain quite the following in the wrestling industry, and even managed to get an audio interview with one of their most common targets, Vince Russo.
  • The so-called You Tube "shooters" (intentally put in quotes, because they're not in the wrestling business), like Bill & Doug (aka RVDTito4Life) and Kent Jones, who love to praise TNA and bash anything that's not TNA, like the WWE or ROH.
    • Bill & Doug were eventually hired by TNA to become the new hosts of the online show, "TNA Addicts", thus achieving "true shooter" status.