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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.
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 He Panned It Now He Sucks, a fan reaction when the Accentuate The Negative reviewer pans a show his fans like.
Examples
- 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 Po E 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).
- 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".
- 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...
- 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.
- John "K" Kricfalusi, creatore of Ren & Stimpy, pretty much hates almost any cartoon airing today that isn't his.
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?
- Um... yes? This Troper has. Many, many times.
- 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.
- Well, that's one of those aforementioned examples where they brought in on themselves.
Literature
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.
- 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.
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.
Real Life
- 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.
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 .
Web Original
Waldorf: Just when you think this page can't get any worse, something wonderful happens!
Waldorf: It ends!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!
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