"
Because guess what? You might not know everything about a genre you refuse to listen to."
An all too common phenomenon among people who bash things: they
don't actually look at what they're bashing. These are the people who insult movies before they even come out, or claim a video game
Rated M for Money has more deplorable content than is actually there (see the page quote).
Note, this doesn't mean you have to sit through an entire movie/play an entire game/watch every episode/listen to every song on the album/read every single page to criticize any pieces of work. It just means you
make sure your criticism is valid.
Popcultural Osmosis is far from authoritative, and it usually leads to
blatantly false information.
If you want to comment on the quality of something, try to actually watch/read/play/listen to at least a substantial part of that work.
Or what if there is a genuine
Wall Banger? You may not even need to look at a work to know a
Wall Banger is bad. Most of us know the shower scene in
Dallas was a damn stupid thing. Some of us know that M. Night Shyamalan casting himself as the indirect savior of mankind in
Lady in the Water is a blatant case of
Mary Sue. Yet even then, make sure the
Wall Banger actually happened. There is no rape option in any of the
Grand Theft Auto games. The closest thing is one of the
Villains doing that in one of the games.
Not the player character.
Also, sometimes this can be
invoked if some leave out the full context of complaints
to make a show they don't like look bad.
Some people have pointed fingers at reviewers and gaming magazines for doing this with games that aren't "Politically important" (which here means, "Are published by big-name companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, EA, Activision, Square-Enix, Valve, and therefore bring a lot of money in via Advertisements"), which tend to get less detailed reviews than some other games. Rather, it's more of a bias since some of these less politically important games get less time devoted to them, but there have been some cases in which it seems like they didn't play that much.
The inverse can happen as well. Someone could complain about a part of a show, and it may actually be worse than the person thinks. It's very rare, but it happens.
Also note that if a person decides they hate something before even watching it their opinion may be less than dependable.
Related:
See also
Moral Guardians, who do this a lot. Additionally, lack of research may lead someone, even unintentionally, to commit an act of
Hypocritical Fandom. Frequently springs from
Did Not Do the Research. When people actually
do watch the show, you get
Don't Like, Don't Read.
The opposite is
Praising Shows You Don't Watch.