Accentuate The Negative - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.

— Food critic Anton Ego, Ratatouille

I know we mainly focused on the shitty aspects, but let me tell you, that's the name of the game.

— The Angry Video Game Nerd, DoubleVision Part 2, ColecoVision

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 and 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 and Troubled Pasts and questionable morals make villains and anti-heroes distinct and recognizable, even if the troubled pasts and questionable morals keep expressing themselves in the same ways.
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.

See also Reviewer Stock Phrases, and He Panned It Now He Sucks, a fan reaction when the Accentuate The Negative reviewer pans a show his fans like.

Examples

Anime and Manga

The Pokémon anime and movies. This is also a definite example of Hype Backlash. Sure, none of the critics like it, but have you ever had a single one say why it was so bad?
- My father says it's glorifying cruelty to animals. Although I like Pokemon for the strategy, I can see his point.
Four Kids Entertainment. Al Kahn and his executives bring it on themselves, but many anime fans unreasonably pan every writers, voice actors, and workers in the entire company as being evil satanic monsters for doing dubs on anime and nothing the company does can ever be in the least bit right.
- After One Piece bombed in the US while Naruto got a decent dub and became a Cash Cow Franchise, this is pretty much what the publishers of One Piece did to 4Kids in Japan. There's a reason they don't dub anime anymore.

Literature

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- What do you expect? This country has gone to the dogs.....
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.
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, and Your Movie Sucks was a direct response to Snark Bait from Deuce Bigalow star Other Rob Schneider
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."
The first line of Anna Karenina is 'Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.' You just can't squeeze 700+ pages out of happy families.

Live Action TV

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?
- Although it's definitely possible to avert this - Michael MacIntyre has become very successful with an observational style that's more about poking gentle fun at the absurdities of human behaviour, for example.
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.
- They are particularly savage if they have a reason to really despise a movie, such as Invasion Of The Neptune Men, which used real footage of Tokyo being bombed to represent the alien invasion. In a kids' movie. Or The Sidehackers, which contained a rape scene so nasty they had to cut it from the TV episode.
The Muppet Show' Statler And Waldorf has this as their shtick.
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.
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.
Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live
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.
MTV Brazil had a show on this, Piores Clipes do Mundo (The Worst Videos In The World). Particularly the segment "Pérola Videoclíptica" ("Music Video Gem"), which had the host pointing out what's ridiculous in each shot of the video.
Titus is all about this. He even says that if his life became too perfect, he'd probably shoot himself.

Newspapers

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.
- Depressingly and racistly they blame many of these ills on immigration.

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.

Theater

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.

Web Comics

Featured as a plot point 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.
Penny Arcade thrives on this trope but they also are able to be very funny when heaping unmitigated praise on something.

Internet

4chan. Encyclopedia Dramatica. Something Awful. They all share about 60% of the same userbase, and violently hate each other. It's a "fun" situation.
- Something Awful has interforum rivalry where everything coming from the all purpose forum GBS is hated by the subforums, 4chan has the same issue.
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 the imageboard that shall not be named, 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.
- The only page in ED that actually praises its 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, Peter Chimaera, Zero Punctuation and oddly, Star Trek Voyager. They also like Dead Space but that's mosty because you get to punt zombie babies.
- As a long-time E Diot, let me clear something up.
  - We're probably joking. Chances are: we don't hate X, in fact, we probably like X, but we find it humorous to bash things that don't desrve it. We're probably rather ambivalent about X, and are only acting like it's worse than slow torture to troll anyone not intelligent enough to spot the joke, because this is also funny.
ED's rival, Uncyclopedia, is more like a parody version of Wikipedia, and the humor is more often flat-out nonsense 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 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. The major exception to this is his first two videos, which were a parody of Accentuate The Negative, made before he knew he would be famous for this stuff.
- Even when he reviews games he actually likes, like Batman: return of the joker for the NES, he still posts a video of all the worst parts of the game,and how much he hates it, then afterwards, casually mentions how it's actually a pretty fun game, just with a flaw or two.
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.
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 Bob Weber Jr. of Slylock Fox and the late Al Scaduto of They'll Do It Every Time. Also notable in that it occasionally does praise elements of the comics that it normally mocks. Occasionally.
Whilst the website 'Cook'd and Bomb'd' is ostensibly a fansite devoted to British comedy (and the works of Chris Morris especially), a quick search of its forums would seem to indicate that its members spend more time fixating on the comedies that they hate as opposed to the ones they enjoy. They even held a mock awards show, the Tumbleweeds, to 'honour' the worst achievements in British comedy over the years in question.
Mr. Cranky.
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.
- In more recent episodes as of this writing (early 2010), he admits to when something is closer to So Bad It's Good than just plain bad in his conclusions, such as Casper, Judge Dredd and Ernest Saves Christmas (which after savaging for 20 minutes, he admits to watching it once a year). Doug Walker himself has also stated he exaggerated his frustrations over The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog for comedy and actually likes it.
Noah Antwiler, aka "Spoony One", is the star of The Spoony Experiment which is basically Angry Video Game Nerd if he were more sarcastic and less cartoony. He does at least take everything in fun, and has a overlap in fandom with the Nerd.
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's less of an Accentuate The Negative and more of an extreme Critical Research Failure. Pretty much the entire thing is a combination of a feminist version of a Chick Tract paired with Demonization, as well as outright lying about the content of the show. Not to mention she waffles back and forth between calling Zoe a powerless, dominated woman and being a strong, self-actualized and independent person. Or how she says Inara violates her agreement with Mal about not "servicing" the crew when she brushes Kaylee's hair or gives Book advice. That's right, kids: if you brush a girl's hair, you're a dirty, contract-breaking, submissive whore. Oh, and if you say anything disrespectful about women, like Jayne, you should be put to death.
- One of the most frustrating things here is that nobody but friends of the author's can post comments here any more.
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.
- Some reviews and fan-screws by people like Ozy&Oni, Uziel, and Digitalpotato (And their various personae) were a little better than just insulting the author and were actually genuine attempts at criticism - even they admitted to picking webcomics that they enjoyed (Which the reveiwers actually did with comics like Super Adventure Quint and The Primer Chronicles) to pick to shreds in an attempt to be more constructive. Except that Ozy&Oni were a little too "Boring" and Digitalpotato more wound up attempting to add subplots in his reviews to make them interesting. (Because who honestly likes it when they aren't picking apart every instance of "Ran Dies"?)
This is EGM game reviewer Seanbaby's preferred method of reviewing, since he specifically seeks out bad games. When one review of his was devoted solely to mocking the box art of a popular game, people sent in letters demanding that he actually review the game itself. Seanbaby's response was "My review is done: the box isn't very good. If I knew how to review a game based on gameplay mechanics or whatever, me and my Gamecube wouldn't be forced to watch puppets shit every month."
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.
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.
- Heck, he'll even do it to games he likes, like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, and Assassins Creed! At one point he actually said "There are a few nitpicks I could make but I wouldn't be the critic I like to think I am if I didn't pick nits like an amphetamine-fuelled chimp" so he pretty much bound to the formula. As he put it, "It's not very funny to like a game."
- If memory serves he did a positively glowing (well, by his standards anyway) review of Painkiller, and that was still pretty funny.
  Yahtzee: All you really need to know is that there is a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I wish I could make something like that up. It shoots shurikens and lightning! It could only be more awesome if it had tits and was on fire.
Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad. While it did contain constructive criticism, the site absolutely hated the comics it reviewed and also bragged about hating the entire concept of a webcomic; it was not affectionate or fannish in the least. Was it horrible or hilarious? You decide!
Linux Hater's Blog is ludicrously negative about users of free software, or, as the author calls them, "freetards". A similar project, The IT Conservative, turned out to be a massive put-on, but the Linux Hater seems to be as earnest as one could possibly be. Speculation remains, as anyone who manages to be that familiar with Linux has to have used it at some point.
Cracked.com's articles consist mainly (but, of course, not completely) of movie bashings, doomsday scenarios and explanations of "Why Good Thing X is actually a very Bad Thing". Ironically the other half is exactly the opposite of this, gushing stories about how awesome the world is.
Confused Matthew is a king of this trope. He reviews several movies, several considered classics like The Lion King and The Incredibles, among many others, and has never looked backed. Check it out for yourself.
The operators of www.anti-shurtugal.com, an anti-fansite for The Inheritance Cycle, founded the site because they discovered that they couldn't say anything critical about the books on the fansites without getting flamed, banned, and/or threatened. So they founded their own site explicitly to point out every single flaw with the books. They eventually added Twilight to the list of literature they hate. The website is now curiously defunct.
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."
- People who believe in the former still exist on the site and tend to look down on those in the latter camp rather sharply. There's also, according to the webmaster (Chet Faliczsek of Portal fame), a silent majority of PoE visitors who ignore the infamous forums and use the site as a non-ironic list of notable fetish and special interest sites.
- An exception would be Dan Lacey, the Catholic artist behind Faith Mouse. He started out as Crazy Awesome (his comic started out as an ultra-conservative right-wing screed with many interpretations) but later became just plain awesome (paintings of various politicians with pancakes on their heads, paintings of a nude Barack Obama riding a unicorn).
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. Scans Daily 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.
The Sturgeon Awards (careful, there's a different Sturgeon Award out there) is a blog dedicated to showing the worst of the 90% of everything.

Real Life

Most Real Life dictators.
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.
- He's hardly the only Roman Historian doing that. Lactantius and Eusebius (Christians) loathed Diocletian and Galerius (among others) for persecuting Christianity (take special attention to Eusebius's description of Galerius's fatal Soap Opera Disease); Zosimus (a Pagan) ruthlessly bashed Constantine for worrying more about religion than the frontiers.
- You think Tacitus was hard on Nero: look at his view of Tiberius, whom he portrays as a literal baby rapist. Ironically, he professed to write sine ira et studio with no fury or bias.
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".
- The documentary film Crumb pretty much cements his repuatation as a lifelong misanthrope.
John "K" Kricfalusi, creatore of Ren And Stimpy, pretty much hates almost any cartoon airing today that isn't his.