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To some people, there is only one thing worse than anything they consider horrible — people liking it.
In a nutshell, a Fan Hater is someone who hates the fans of a particular work. Often in a Hatedom, but not always.
The thing is that to these people, art is Serious Business and they treat their enjoyment of art the way some people take to competitive gaming. If you like anything not up to their standards, they will either mock you, mock that thing in front of your face, or just go on a diatribe about why you shouldn't like that thing. To make matters worse, they will also stereotype fans (e.g., anybody who likes comic books is an obese loser; anyone who likes anime is some annoying, anti-American, over-obsessive wannabe Japan-fetishizing freak; people who like cartoons are Man Children; boys who watchgirls' cartoonsare gay; anyone who likes metal/punk is a wannabe tough guy or a pretentious hipster jackass; people who like rap are wangsters; etc.) and not fitting any of these stereotypes will induce either a No True Scotsman or they'll still find at least one thing they find negative and stereotype the fans of the work with said negative thing. Fan Haters tend to refer to the targets of their hatred as the "Lowest Common Denominator" or "unwashed masses".
Be warned some may pretend to be fan haters, but are in fact Trolls, which some find to be worse, depending on who you are.
A Sub-Trope of Hate Dumb and Opinion Myopia. The inverse is Complaining about People Not Liking the Show.
Due to past messes, please avoid Take That statements, flame bait, "This Troper" blurbs, redundancy and redundancy.
Common forms of this trope:
Accentuate the Negative - In which the person sees or expresses nothing but negative values in a work and trashes anyone who dares to actually like the work.
Adaptation Decay, in that they hate anyone who likes an adaptation that isn't the original version.
Animation Age Ghetto, in that they hate anyone older than 12 who watches anything animated.
Broken Base, in that the dissenters will hate the loyalists for not giving up on a particular series.
Hype Backlash - In which they hate a work simply because of the attention it has received or is receiving. A subset hates things that are critically-acclaimed.
Stop Being Stereotypical - In which a work has a notoriously unpleasant or obnoxious fanbase that results in more level-headed fans turning against the rest of the fandom; when someone says something akin to "I love the work but the fans are assholes", this is the sentiment at play.
Love Lucky has an in-universe example with Erika, the female lead singer of the rock band "M.I.T.", who is a self-professed hater of "normal people". This apparently arose from the way she was treated by the band's fans after she replaced the previous lead.
Dragon Ball Z has an in-universe case of this. In one of the episodes during the Buu arc before the World Martial Arts Tournament begins, Krillin comments on how he's unsure of who is more annoying: Mr. Satan or his fans.
During the Cell saga Krillin also admited to cheering for Cell during Cell's "fight" with Satan.
Fan Fiction
My Immortal is basically set in a world with this as its hat. There are but three sorts of people in My Immortal-land; "goffs", "posers" and "preps". Being a "goff", which entails wearing black clothes from Hot Topic and listening to the emo bands the author likes, is the One True Path and everyone else sucks for existing. "Preps" are the unwashed masses who shop at Abercrombie & Fitch and worship Britney Spears. "Posers" are "preps" who try to be "goffic" but listen to the "wrong" music and are thus evil.
This one is based in reality. During the late 1970s there was a very real rivalry between rock fans and disco fans. The rivalry came to a head on July 12, 1979 (sometimes referred to as "the night disco died") during a baseball promotion called Disco Demolition Night, which resulted in thousands of rock fans storming the field at Chicago's Comiskey Park to express their hatred of disco. The event made news worldwide and less than a year later disco was effectively dead in the United States and Canada (although it would remain popular in Europe for another few years). See also: Deader Than Disco
Literature
There's a line in American Psycho where Patrick mentions that no one should feel sympathy for the woman he's forcing into getting an abortion due to the fact that her favorite movie is Pretty in Pink and "she thinks Sting is cool."
Rob Fleming from High Fidelity (Rob Gordon in The Movie) questions how one can be friends with people whose favorite band are Simple Minds. One of the reasons why he dislikes Ian is because of that weird ethno music he listens to. And Barry chases a potential customer out of Rob's record store because he wanted to acquire I Just Called To Say I Love You, a song from Stevie Wonder's 80s pop period.
Live-Action TV
If you like Final Fantasy or any JRPGs, then there is a 100% chance you will be hated by Adam and Morgan of X-Play. They're also not fond of anyone who likes anime—which they in particular love to trash, most of their Fullmetal Alchemist and Dragon Ball Z game reviews are trashing the people who will flame them.
Adam and Morgan (less and less as of late, as we might get two reviews in a week now) flame them because, as they've stated repeatedly, they get hate mail every time they review a JRPG or anime-licensed game, regardless of the actual score they give.
This is because they don't take criticism well. Look at the fights that erupted over the Mass Effect ending. Dealing with a divisive, popular topic is going to get you some measure of hate. Hurling insults back isn't going to make it go away. Because, at the end of the day, you aren't going to remember that they gave your favorite game a 4/5, you're going to remember that they made 3 jokes about you being an obsessive cosplaying otaku virgin in the space of 2 minutes.
In Friends, it's mentioned that Chandler once broke up with a girl because she didn't hate Yanni.
In Big Brother's 11th American Season, four previous players were invited as "guests" to give their insight on the current game being played. Danielle stated that she wanted Natalie to win, and held up her hand to silence the audience, who begun to boo.
Players have taken potshots at the fans of other players (or even previous seasons) but these have never made the feeds. There was also controversy in Season 13 where Jeff had gone off on a rant, not only insulting the premise of Harry Potter but also taking a few potshots at the fans.
In one episode of Community, Abed calls Shirley a terrible person for liking Brett Ratner's movies.
On The Mighty Boosh, Vince Noir is the self-styled "King of the Mods". When he meets his friend's mentor, the mentor bursts out screaming "A mod?! I am a Rocker! He is a Mod! We are mortal enemies!" This doubles as a Historical In-Joke which references the two sub-cultures clashing in 1960's England.
In one episode of Psych, Shawn and Gus take on a client who's dying from polonium poisoning. Shawn repeatedly berates the poor guy for proudly stating that his favorite band is Duran Duran.
Music
The lyrics to Sloan's "Coax Me" include the line, "it's not the band I hate: it's their fans".
Sloppy Seconds' song "You've Got A Great Body, But Your Record Collection Sucks" is all about this trope.
Professional Wrestling
This was Michael Cole's gimmick when he became a heel on WWE NXT and commentary. If the fans and the IWC loved it he would hate it (such as Daniel Bryan,) and if they hated wrestling characters like Vickie Guerrero, he would absolutely love them, to piss off the fans.
This is the gimmick of The Shield. If the fans want something and they have the opportunity to ruin it. They will every time, and call it "justice".
Videogames
The Krunch radio station from the Saints Row series is a hard rock and metal station that will frequently air this between songs:
"Do you like pop music? Go fuck yourself! 106.66, Krunch!"
That parodies the fan-pandering promos many radio stations use:
We only have the [music genre] you [Target Demographic] like, and everyone else can go to hell!
As part of its increasing meta-ness, Act 6 of Homestuck introduces undyingUmbrage, who is basically a personification of the comic's fan haters. This includes the people who complain about their friends talking about Homestuck and trying to get them interested in it.
This character is revealed to be a younger version of Lord English, who in the second intermission of Act 6 murdered Homestuck author Andrew Hussie.
The Spoony One made a series of videos talking about his hatred for Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy X-2. This has caused Noah Antwiler (who plays Spoony) to take some real backlash, with him having to point out that Spoony is a character and not everything "he" says is Noah's real opinion.
Then things got a little worse when Noah (not Spoony) disparaged Nintendonote Saying they needs to shut the doors on all of their primary franchises, especially Zelda, which he calls an unchanging series and TRON: Legacynote Calling the movie crap and one of the worst films of 2010 and insulting anyone who liked it by saying they have low standards and are easily entertained.
He also said that if you like Final Fantasy XIII, you are lying to yourself.
Yahtzee is prone to doing this and he doesn't just hate one kind of gamer - he's hated on people who like Eastern RPGs, Western RPGs, Silent Hill fans, people who like Halo, people who played Psychonauts, people who didn't play Psychonauts, console gamers, PC gamers, fans of point and click adventure games, people who own a Wii, fans of MMORPGs, Korean gamers, fans of sprite comics, fans of Control Alt Delete, fans of The Sims, Retro gamers, Indie gamers, people who hate retro, people who hate indies, Joss Whedon, anyone who likes Joss Whedon, etc. Most it is hyperbolic though, and plays into the Misanthrope SupremeHates Everyone Equally persona he adopts for the reviews, and he frequently drops Hypocrisy Nods as he is a self-admitted fan of quite a few things from the preceding list.
Movie Bob has frequently argued that his personal and private tastes are objective facts rather than subjective opinions, and uses this argument in an effort to justify hating not merely works of art, but people who like them. A large part of his considerable internet Hate Dom arises from fans invoking He Panned It, Now He Sucks, and another part from being told that You Like It So You Suck.
Mario Teh Plumber absolutely despises modern Sonic games as well as anybody who likes them, labeling them as "modern morons" and "hentai faggots".
Black Pawn Movement is made up of a group of fans and anti-fans of the series Twilight, dealing with the most obnoxious fans on Youtube. Since the Twilight hype has died down, they have been switching to music, such as Lady Gaga, Insane Clown Posse, and Justin Bieber.
In the Plinkett Reviews of the Star Wars Prequels he says that if you thought the prequels were "betterer" or were less "boringer" than the original then you're wrong.
Game Show Garbage, a WrestleCrap-type site that focuses on Game Shows, recently featured the Price is Right fan site Golden-Road.net as one of their inductions. In the article, Robert Seidelman collectively dismisses the members of the community as Fan Dumb, accusing them of having overactive Nostalgia Filters and being too quick to cry They Changed It, Now It Sucks. He also takes a milder swipe at the GSN message boards. The article eventually was toned down to be a little less harsh and remove attacks on specific members.
Encyclopedia Dramatica also has an article bashing Golden-Road.net.
It's pretty clear in his Turn Up The Music review that Todd in the Shadows hates Chris Brown's "Team Breezy" fans as much as (or possibly even worse than) Chris Brown himself, citing all the instances in which they wrote off the Rihanna scandal (or even worse, accused her of instigating it) and even admit that they'd let Chris Brown beat them (though he admits that at least some of the latter posts/tweets/etc are more than likely Trolls.)
Subverted by Doug Walker, who says that he actually wants to meet someone who liked The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (cited by him as the worst movie he's ever seen) just so he can hear why they'd like it. He also has valiantly tried to get it into fandom's heads that this trope is awful.
Despite that though, he has mocked fans of TMZ and Happy Madison for being unintelligent, and The Nostalgia Critic being much worse with this in reboot despite coming round to Doug's POV in his Series Fauxnale was called out by Sage.
Rob Walker, Doug's brother and co-writer, however, is by means not above this trope, especially towards fans of Man of Steel. He even insulted Angry Joe because he defended it, and attacking fans on Facebook who commented on the fact they enjoyed it, in one case even insulting one for "not being able to accept other people's opinions" when the fan called him out on insulting fans for liking it, without any sense of irony.
Confused Matthew also seems to fit this trope. He seems to be unable to understand how anyone can like the certain movies that he absolutely despises (The Lion King and 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular). And sometimes can (probably unintentionally) insult the fans of the movie that he's reviewing.