Fan Hater - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Fan Haters; Dead Horse Entertainment; Not Allowed To Like It

Confused Matthew admits he liked "Bayformers".

"Final Fantasy VIII sucks and you suck for liking it!"

—Noah "The Spoony One" Antwiler

"Creed sucks! I hate you, and I hate the bands you like!"

To some people, there is only one thing worse than anything they consider So Bad Its Horrible; people actually liking it.

In a nutshell, a Fan Hater is someone in a Hatedom, who hates not only the work, but also the fans of that work.

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. A common term that Fan Haters are fond of using, is "Lowest Common Denominator".

As a work becomes more popular, the probability of such a group appearing approaches one. Today's media landscape seems to encourage this somewhat, because In A World where executives and producers seem to believe in Quality By Popular Vote, and because Ratings are so important in determining what keeps getting made and what gets cancelled, it's easy for fans of one thing that might be on the verge of getting canned to resent the people who are making another work so popular (and thus keeping it on the air), as they blame those fans for their own favorite work's misfortune.

But others seem to just want to rail against fans simply because they think it makes them superior. This group is comparable to Moral Guardians, only it's their own subjective tastes they are trying to guard. These kinds of people are a big reason for some people's mentality of He Panned It Now He Sucks: Fan Haters are always waiting for an opportunity to pounce, and even a single negative critical opinion of something is usually enough to "justify" their "this thing is bad and you should feel bad for liking it" rants. It also contributes to Complaining About People Not Liking The Show: because there are quite a few Fan Haters out there, some fans mistake an honest criticism of a work for Fan Hating and get very defensive.

It is a very odd phenomena, because after all, not everyone enjoys the same things. And maybe they just don't enjoy it for one reason or another, not because of their sexual orientation, not because of their intelligence, not because they're old or inexperienced, they just happen to like it. But chances are if you like something that's subject to fan haters, expect one of those comments to be thrown at you. It's incredibly rare to see someone who actually acknowledges that maybe you like different things because you're not mentally ill or homosexual or "haven't seen a 'true' something".

Of course actually being familiar with the works people aren't supposed to like is entirely optional.

Contrast the inverse, Complaining About People Not Liking The Show, where fans of a show will lambast you for not liking it. This activity has also been known to spawn Fan Haters, though in that case, the hate starts with the fans and spreads to the work. Also compare Tainted By The Fanbase, where you love the work but hate the fans. Also, when a fan likes the show, but is a Fan Hater toward a certain character on the show, it's a specific type of Fan Dumb known as The Hate Monger.

Be warned some may pretend to be fan haters, but are in fact Trolls, which is even worse.

A Sub Trope of both Hatedom and Opinion Myopia.

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
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.
Dead Horse Genre
Deader Than Disco
Fan Dumb
Hype Aversion
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.
Internet Backdraft
Its Popular Now It Sucks
Jerkass
Misaimed Fandom, in which they hate you for liking something the "wrong way".
Serious Business
Still The Eighties, as well as not recognizing that media, genres and sub-genres can evolve.
Stop Having Fun Guys, in which you get hate for playing a game the "wrong way."
Tastes Like Diabetes
All the True Art pages
And especially Guilty Pleasures, because they'll try to make you feel guilty for it.

Websites specializing in Fan Hating (and Hatedom):

4chan, varying by board.
The Encyclopedia Dramatica
Something Awful
The Best Page In The Universe
Your Webcomic is Bad And You Should Feel Bad
Television Without Pity
The Bad Webcomics Wiki

Examples here should be from in media. Anything else goes to the troper tales page.

See this article from The Onion: "Man Who Enjoys Thing Informed He Is Wrong"
In Beavis And Butthead, they were watching a Bon Jovi video. Beavis didn't think it was that bad, and Butthead kept smacking him for not thinking it sucked. Finally Beavis got fed up and kicked Butthead in the nuts.
One of the quotes on the page shows that the Spoony One hates Final Fantasy VIII, releasing a lot of videos to show how much he hates it and why he thinks the game is retarded. At least half of one video is dedicated to trashing the fans who draw hentai or cosplay. Of course, Rule Of Funny states that he has to ignore all the people doing the exact same thing to other games.
If you like Final Fantasy or any JRP Gs, then there is a 100% chance you will be hated by Adam and Morgan of X Play. They're part of the reason there's a taboo against saying anything positive about JRP Gs. Also consider yourself hated if you like anime - which they in particular love to trash, most of their Full Metal Alchemist and Dragon Ball Z game reviews are trashing the people who will flame them.
- Of course, in all fairness, it is something of a Take That against any and all fans of...well...pretty much any Anime fan in general due to said fans' habit of sending hate-mail to Adam & Morgan whenever they give a negative review of a game based off of a popular series. The hatred appears to be more towards die-hard fans of various Anime shows (Particularly Fullmetal Alchemist and Dragonball Z) rather than your casual Anime fan.
  - Adam and Morgan don't go out of their way to antagonize people who like the games they don't care for - they just mention it because they're used to people screaming at them for not giving their favorite franchise a positive review just because. Like the time they called Alphonse Elric a "robot in a loincloth" and got flamed to a crisp.
  - They did praise Final Fantasy XII, however, though they seemed to be very surprised at the fact that they wanted to give the game a perfect 5-out-of-5 score. Evidently they hated the series?
Yahtzee is prone to doing this and he doesn't just hate one kind of gamer - he's hated on people who like JRP Gs, Western RP Gs, Silent Hill fans (even he admits to doing so himself - he said his Silent Hill Origins review was mostly him crying) people who like Halo, people who played Psychonaughts, people who didn't play Psychonaughts, 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. In general, it's safe to assume that Yahtzee hates everyone, and the sensitive souls who take it to heart aren't in for a good time. Unfortunately, people on The Escapist have somehow taken this mindset seriously and adopted it, and will sadly probably never ever enjoy a video game again.
- The biggest example is his Smash Brothers review. At least 60% of the review itself was saying "I do not like fighting games so I will not show any interest in it" or hating on fans, then the following up video was fan hatred.
Film Scholar Ray Carney had actually done this with Citizen Kane. His review had not only said that Kane was obviously an Author Avatar on top of mentioning many (sadly ignored) faults such as (even for the time) slow pace and mediocre acting, but also insulted its critics who reviewed it favourably:
Ray Carney: "...critics obviously enjoy being told what to think or they'd never sit still for the hammy acting, cartoon characterizations, tendentious photography, editorializing blockings, and absurdly grandiose (and annoyingly insistent) metaphors....When will film studies grow up? Even Jedediah Leland, the opera reviewer in the film, knew better than to be taken in by Salammbo's empty reverberations."