He Panned It, Now He Sucks!

This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

"See, I've been reviewing pop music a long time, and in doing so, I have said something to piss off every major fanbase in the universe. I have had my mentions swarmed and my day ruined by the BTS Army, the Rihanna Navy, the Little Monsters, the Swifties, the Beyhive, the Beliebers, the Barbz — oh God, the Barbz — the Directioners, the Lovatics, the Selenators, the Arianators, most recently the Camilizers, and so on."

— Todd in the Shadows, Trainwreckords: Katy Perry's "Witness"

So you've found a new review site that's full of Accentuate the Negative and Bile Fascination, and it isn't afraid to point out every flaw, weakness, and obscure little nit-pick that it can about a work. And you love it because it's funny, well-written, comical, and/or biased toward your particular viewpoint.

Everything is fine until the reviewer trashes one of your favorite works.

There's a tentative state that most of the viewers of these sites exist in — a thin line between thinking the reviewer is the funniest thing on earth and thinking that they're a horrible person who didn't deserve to see the thing, let alone trash it so badly. This exists because, at any moment, the reviewer could find something wrong with one of your personal favorites. All of a sudden the game is up, and you see the reviewer for who they really are — a vile piece of ludicrously insensitive vomit-caked negativity who only exists to blow holes in otherwise good things, a bad writer complaining about others' bad writing.

This can be particularly (even excessively) apparent if what the reviewer is criticizing is either (a) incredibly popular and/or (b) possesses an intensely committed fanbase. It's not easy to go against the grain and admit that your tastes are not in step with the majority, especially if that majority consists of people who mistake an attack on their favorite work as an attack on them personally.

A sub-trope of Accentuate the Negative. Fairly common when Critical Backlash is involved. This can also happen if a once reviled work has been Vindicated by History, but the reviewer still despises the work regardless.

Compare Complaining About People Not Liking the Show, Let's See YOU Do Better!, Opinion Myopia, and It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars. Also compare The Complainer Is Always Wrong.

Contrast with the He Panned It, Now It Sucks section of the Hate Dumb article; for a trope actually working like "He Panned It, Now It Sucks", see Reviews Are the Gospel.

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Examples

• Jimquisition
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter
• The Nostalgia Critic
• PhantomStrider
• Schaffrillas Productions

Anime

• Dogasu, who runs a site committed to changes made in Pokémon:
  • Openly stated that he didn't like the dark tone Team Rocket took in Best Wishes!, largely because, as he has pointed out, the team were still making rookie mistakes, just not in a particularly entertaining way like before. Supporters of the serious Team Rocket did not take this well, and flooded him with angry blog posts and emails in response.
    The dislike of the serious Team Rocket came to a head with his virulent comparisons of the Battle Subway two-parter; which has to be his biggest backlash against disliking a Best Wishes! episode; with people saying his scathing thoughts statements that began the comparisons went too far and the forums for his website being filled with angry comments.
  • He also took heat for disliking the Don Battle/Club Battle arc; and by extension, disparaging Zorua got him in further trouble from numerous Zorua fans.
  • To a lesser extent, there are a few comparisons of well-regarded episodes that Dogasu admitted he disliked; which include "Pikachu's Goodbye", "Gotta Catch Ya Later", and the two-parter in Advanced Generation regarding Misty's return.
  • Even his tidbits that don't involve comparisons aren't immune. Dogasu jokingly made fun of Keldeo's dub voice in the trailer for Pokémon: Kyurem vs. The Sword of Justice...which happened to be done by Vic Mignogna; thereupon getting Dogasu ridiculed by his followers.
• According to TIME Magazine, several critics received hate mail from children for panning Pokémon: The First Movie.
• Professor Otaku seems to cause this a lot with his angry reviewer style, but the worst case was his review of Toradora!. He's also had heat for his opinion of Gurren Lagann being too stupid, although he's never officially reviewed it.
• Animerica's Phoenix seems to get this a lot with his angry reviewer style, but the worst case was his review of Haibane Renmei, even lampshading it as their most controversial review. He's also had heat for his abrasive opinion on Gurren Lagann, although he's never officially reviewed it.
• Evan Minto of Otaku USA Magazine got a taste of this when he panned Casshern Sins.
• JesuOtaku expected this to happen after his lukewarm reviews of (the enormously popular) Neon Genesis Evangelion and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann—saying something to the effect of "I need to go hide from the Loony Fans now" at the end of each—but there wasn't much backlash. Instead, he mainly gets hit with this due to overly harsh Twitter comments about shows and/or their fans.
• Don East ironically never faced this in his series, Anime Abomination. Rather, he faced this when live-tweeting shows that aired on Toonami. The two shows he was the most critical towards were Sword Art Online and Blue Exorcist. The latter in particular suffered this because he tended to call the series a generic shonen anime, but explaining very little just why it was. It was especially jarring since he praised One Piece and Soul Eater to the high heavens, but some have accused those shows of having more glaring cliches than Blue Exorcist. Most of his complaints towards the series, especially the first portion, were nitpicks at worst (like complaining about the Camping Trip episode allegedly being filler without even sitting through it entirely). He unfairly treated Shiemi as The Scrappy while he tended to gush over similar characters like Orihime. One moment of frustration with the series had him deliberately spoil that Shima was a double agent, which he actually apologized for. One incident, he made an implied threat towards fans of the series if the show got better ratings than One Piece (saying that he hoped for their sake that he didn't meet any of them at a convention he was going to at the time). It's not so much that he panned the series that got under people's skins, but rather his overall attitude towards it. Another odd thing was that when he riffed the first episode, he wasn't as harsh on it as the rest of the series, so it makes you wonder if he wanted to hate the series afterword simply because it got better ratings than One Piece. He also criticized Attack on Titan, but most people let it slide because he was at least fair towards the series.
• Super Eyepatch Wolf got himself into this, coincidentally involving series from Weekly Shonen Jump:
  • His "Fall of Bleach" video didn't resonate well with Bleach fans despite trying to cover its decline that lead into the abrupt and disappointing finale then outright mockery of the series, with many pointing out his lack of research. While he acknowledged his mistake with a follow up vid that had more accurate facts and constructive criticism, even pointing out his video is just his own opinion on the matter and no one should take it as gospel, some of the more hardcore fanbase of the series still lambasted him for even daring to speak ill of the manga. One of them, DBZimran in particular even made his own videos to counter his arguments (with him even dubbing the second vid as "The Rise of Bleach" for good measure).
  • John's comments on PPPPPP in his 2022 Jump video weren't well received by many of the series fans, both with him mocking the series title as ridiculous (in spite of it being actual piano terminology), and using half of a two-page spread to "prove" his argument of the series having poor artistic composition, both of which came off as disingenuous. His continued dismissal of Mission: Yozakura Family has had a similar reaction from its fans.

Comic Books

• Atop the Fourth Wall:
  • It's probably not a coincidence that Linkara's review of Ultimates 3, during which he admitted that he didn't like Loeb's The Long Halloween, has received more bashing than usual.
  • The Frank Miller fanboys got very angry over his review of The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Linkara took major issue with this, especially one message that literally argued Miller did so much great stuff early on that his later work should get a free pass regardless of actual quality. Plus, he didn't exactly inspire a lot of hate for his mockery of Stan Lee's Nightcat.
  • He didn't even pan The Maxx, instead merely admit that he had no idea what was going on (the story is a Mind Screw, and he was reading a one-shot that explained nothing), and had no particular interest in finding out. Nonetheless, The Maxx is a Cult Classic, so you can bet the fans took anything other than praise as an insult. Linkara even addressed this in his "Top 15 Screw-Ups" video.
  • Linkara also invited some of this in the "Next 15 AT4W Screw-Ups" video when he stated his dislike of the X-Men, going on a long tirade about blaming the team for being the in-universe causes of some of his most hated crossover events in Marvel's then-recent history. The backlash prompted him to clarify in his following video reviewing "Youngblood #5" that he was "half-joking" and stated while they're not his most favorite team, he doesn't hate the X-Men and acknowledged that there were plenty of bad storylines that have nothing to do with them and they actually had some great storylines and good characters in its roster.
  • Linkara also said at a con that this is why he didn't review comics by Garth Ennis or Mark Millar, despite the fact that he doesn't really like their work. He did look at a Superman PSA comic the latter wrote, but this was actually a positive review, noting that when Millar's given restraint on his work (as was the case here), he can often find him pretty decent. The only other Mark Millar comic that Linkara reviewed, Trouble, is one that Millar himself has since abandoned.
  • He definitely caught Hell from the fans during his review of Rogue One over the famed Hallway scene. Though for most it wasn't so much the criticism then how he went about it. Normally he's pretty calm and respectful on why certain things didn't agree with him. But his demeanor for the dislike comes off more that he was just sick of people gushing over it, doing the usual "Oh hey this is awesome, no it isn't" shtick he usually does for some of his reviews and his reasons amounting to "Vader isn't as subtle as he is in the original". Many comments against him likening him to an curmudgeon old man waving his fist and doing a rant of "Back in my day...", not helped by him using clips to try and illustrate his point.

Fan Work

• The Owl House of Amphibia: ChampionElCid, author of The Owl and The Frog, got some backlash from some of the fic's readers due to him posting a review that accused the author of stealing his ideas, especially with how The Owl House of Amphibia has a nearly-identical start. This is due to the fact that only two chapters of the story have been posted and that they should give the story a chance to see how it fleshes out before making any accusations. Fortunately, both sides made amends regarding this. In the third chapter, Iron117Prime, went on record and stated that his story was inspired by ChampionElCid story but made it clear that his story will play out differently from his story.

Film

• The Nostalgia Chick:
  • She got a taste of this when she panned almost the entirety of the Transformers franchise (not just the Michael Bay films) in a review. Comments of "You're a girl, you wouldn't understand!" abounded. And it wasn't even a pan, more of a "brilliant idea, lots of fun, but boy is it silly", a viewpoint held by many sane Transfans.
  • Happened again, only more so, after she trashed David Lynch's Dune (1984). This was mostly a combination of her spending a lot of time calling the Spice a "MacGuffin", which it isn't really, and trashing the novel as well as the movie (Several Dune fans didn't like the movie either).
  • She got some hate for mentioning she hated The Little Mermaid, calling it a film about "a dumb girl who sold her soul for a vagina and a man she didn't know". Later on, she parodied this by dedicating a video to her friends staging an "intervention" in which she explains her opinions in more depth, the others explain why it's a great film, and in the end, she breaks and joins in the singing of "Part of Your World".
  • She, along with Todd in the Shadows, received some hatred for not liking Wreck-It Ralph. She's stated that an explanation would come, but she never quite got around to making it.
• Keeping with more Channel Awesome contributors, Mathew Buck a.k.a. Film Brain of Bad Movie Beatdown has gotten this. Specific examples include:
  • His negative review of the Cult Classic Equilibrium was met with a backlash so intense to the point where the video had to be posted with a disclaimer that did absolutely nothing to soothe it. He also made several comparisons to the film in later reviews too, which did not cool flames.
  • Film Brain's extremely negative review of Inglourious Basterds caused another round of this, to the point where even The Spoony One had to chip in. It did not help that he scored it lower than Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen.
  • The Spoony One got so much heat from the Hudson Hawk fanbase when he announced his intent to review the movie that he canceled the review, letting Film Brain do it instead. That's right - a semi-obscure early-90s Bruce Willis movie has a more terrifying fanbase than Final Fantasy.
  • His crossover review with JesuOtaku for Sucker Punch also got hit by this. The comments by many (though not all) of the movie's fans are divided between "You just don't get it" and "Just turn your brain off and enjoy it".
  • Then there's the crossover review of Batman Returns with Bennett the Sage. No need to explain how it turned out. Though it should be noted that Bennett did considerably more panning, emphasizing his general dislike of Tim Burton, which wasn't shared by Mathew.
  • He opened his fifth season with a 2-part negative review of Prometheus. You can guess how that turned out.
  • His So Okay, It's Average Projector review of Deadpool has been a point of contention.
• Brad Jones has gotten this as well. His negative review of Man of Steel has only 3 1/2 stars on Channel Awesome due to angry fans giving it a low rating. It didn't help when the opinion that both Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace were more enjoyable came up...
• CinemaSins gets this all the time, due to the combination of counting even the smallest nitpicks as sins and making videos about almost any film, no matter how popular or critically acclaimed (the channel's slogan is "No Movie Is Without Sin" for a reason). In the comment section on every video that isn't about a So Bad, It's Good or just plain bad movie, you can expect to see fans of the movie complaining about how the criticisms are unfair, missing the part where the sins being so nitpicky and nonsensical is the joke. The fact he's made videos on so many beloved movies has also earned the channel a major Hatedom. In fairness, Cinema Sins generally doesn't bother hiding their scorn for movies they don't like, and are sometimes visibly harder on them than others.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 took serious flak from other science fiction fans when The Movie riffed on sci-fi classic This Island Earth. It didn't help that Earth was HEAVILY edited so it would fit in the MST3K format. The creators' response was to tell people to go rewatch the movie and, according to them, no one followed up saying they still thought it was a classic.
• Much like Cinema Sins, Honest Trailers gets no small amount of criticism for nitpicking all the flaws of a movie in the name of being "honest", even though that's part of the idea. Admittedly, also like Cinema Sins it's not helped by the writers' tendency to almost not bother hiding their scorn for movies they didn't like (this is especially apparent in their videos about The Hobbit, or The Dark Knight Rises), including levying personal mockery against people involved in production, leading some viewers to accuse them of being more interested in personally ranting than anything else.
• Jenna Busch of Joblo.com came under fire after giving a 6/10 review for the Watchmen movie.
• Roger Ebert: Overall, he gets this from a lot of fans of movies because he says exactly what he thinks in the context of giving a film a proper analysis. His unconventional approach lands him with this trope from both his fans and detractors, but apart from his bias blind spot for video games, animation and slasher films, it is mostly undeserved. Specific examples include:
  • Received some criticism for his questionably good reviews of movies others have perceived as bad — Speed 2: Cruise Control being perhaps the best example — but the biggest source of criticism came from his review of Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, where not only did he pronounce it as a bad film, but he suggested that those who thought it was a good one were not "sufficiently evolved" in their cinematic tastes.
  • And people exploded at him after his one-star review of Kick-Ass.
  • There was also his lukewarm review of How to Train Your Dragon, where the flames were further fanned by him disparaging Video Games. This is a particularly ugly case, since he clearly stated that he enjoyed the film but only felt that it didn't have enough character development, and his alleged Take That! at Video Games consisted of him comparing the flying shots and dragon battles to video game sequences and adding that he wasn't a fan of Video Games.
  • A very similar case of this occurred when he reviewed Hitman, stating that it was all good if not for the shooting gallery segments that had been obviously ripped from the video game on which the film is based. At no point did he take into account the distinct lack of events like this in said video games.
  • He also gets flak from the animation community sometimes for holding some Animation Age Ghetto beliefs (of note, he thought Don Bluth's 1980s films were too scary and depressing for children to handle). Though he has criticized the ghetto and defended animation as a medium on other occasions (see his quote on the Animation Age Ghetto page), he seems to go back and forth.
  • He was also accused of "bourgeois elitism" when he appeared to brand all slasher films as "dead teenager movies". He was bashed around a lot for this on other sites. He clarified that he isn't opposed to the genre per se, he sought to contrast films like Halloween (1978) and the "excellent" Wes Craven's New Nightmare with what he saw as an overly formulaic breasts and gore template that consisted of attractive teenagers being luridly murdered with the exception of a sole survivor for a stinger ending or to populate a sequel.
  • Then there was his review of The Godfather Part II. In his own words, "Of all of the reviews I have ever written, my three-star review of 'Part II' has stirred the most disagreement. Sometimes it is simply cited as proof of my worthlessness." Thirty-four years after daring to give the film his minimum positive rating in 1974, he finally added it to his "Great Movies" collection — but mostly because he felt it complemented the first film, rather than because it was great on its own. Looking back on his original review, Ebert said he "wouldn't change a word." Got to give the man credit for standing by his opinions, however unpopular.
  • He was also the only critic on Rotten Tomatoes to not like the movie Brazil.
  • He also famously gave a one and a half star review to Blue Velvet, one of David Lynch's most highly acclaimed films. Despite the backlash, he apparently never changed his mind.
  • He also got tons of flak for his negative reviews of Thor and The Raid Redemption. He actually apologized for his review of the former, stating that he let his emotions that day write the review, however, he seemed to show no remorse for his review of the latter. People actually questioned if he had paid attention to the film or not.
• Both Ebert and Gene Siskel stated on their show that they liked Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, even regretting that they didn't review it at the time of its theatrical release (they reviewed it at the time of Batman Forever's theatrical run)—but unfortunately, Siskel ended up angering fans when he said he wasn't a fan of Mark Hamill's Joker.
• Chuck Sonnenberg aka SF Debris posted a pretty critical review of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on YouTube, praising the film's technical aspects but heavily deriding the storyline as being slow and uninvolving. This quickly led to some rather angry posts from that certain section of Star Trek fandom that considers TMP to be a sacred masterpiece, who promptly started making accusations about the level of education that he had (or hadn't) received.
  • He rebutted their claims at the end of his Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan review, even to the point of preemptively defending his giving TWOK a 10/10 over the 4/10 he gave TMP.
  • The funny thing about all this is that he constantly reminds people that his reviews are very clearly his opinions (his regular Star Trek episode reviews even have "Opinionated" tacked on to them) and that it is very likely that they might not agree with him on many things. Some fans just can't stand a dissenting opinion it seems.
  • This happened to a much lesser extent with his review of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock which, despite scoring 6/10, fared pretty badly in the review and was said to have no significant positive points at all (although he didn't think there were any major negatives either, hence the final score). The overall response was nowhere near as vitriolic as what happened with TMP, but quite a few fans were "disappointed" that the film didn't score better.
• Armond White. See this list◊ of his movie likes and dislikes for a (by far) non-exhaustive number of reasons people have petitioned to have him banned from Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert defended him at first, but after reading the list, took it back, going so far as to call him a Troll. His notorious hatred of Pixar (he claims the critical and commercial acclaim Pixar has received is due to capitalist brainwashing and that it ruins animation) culminated in his panning of Toy Story 3, bringing Toy Story 3's Rotten Tomatoes ranking from a 100% to a 99%. His complaints were that it promoted consumerist culture and product placement; Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen had explored similar themes, with greater "thrill and opulence", that no one could relate to the story. He went on to state that anyone who liked it was a simplistic adult-child. Oh, and Hamm was a villain. The backlash against him (and Cole Smithey, who didn't recommend the film because it was too intense for a G rating) was huge, getting a mention on Time's NewsFeed, and in the editorial section of The Wall Street Journal.
• Cole Smithey did it again by writing the first negative review of Lady Bird, which stated that while he did enjoy the film, he decided to give it a bad review simply because he felt it didn't "deserve" a 100%.
• Rotten Tomatoes was infamous for this. When various films opened up with very high percentages, the few critics who gave the movie a Rotten score were sure to get a lot of flak, which could range from genuine criticism of the critic's points to outright bashing and threatening. Sometimes, this happened when a critic's blurb got taken out of context, which unintentionally made the reviewer look more pretentious or foolish to readers. This effect got compounded when said bashers collectively wanted to see that movie soon, and/or the critics are chronic offenders of giving low scores (or the inverse case). Even if the overall score settled somewhere down the middle, the first few critics always got the brunt of the insults. It doesn't help that Rotten Tomatoes' method of scoring is flawed since the website merely gives estimate scores from the vastly different scoring systems that critics use. Eventually, it got so bad that Rotten Tomatoes axed all commenting on individual reviews, to no one's surprise.
  • This finally entered the limelight when fans hyped for The Dark Knight Rises savaged the pre-screening rotten reviews, vehemently threatening the reviewers in question and even conspiring to sabotage their review websites. Eventually, the comments were removed (people were adding death threats and rape threats), and it wasn't long before the option to comment on a review was removed altogether. This becomes Harsher in Hindsight after a shooting took place at the movie's midnight screening in Aurora, Colorado.
    • Another reviewer who compared it to Transformers got so much sudden traffic that his website crashed! That's why you should think before you post.
  • Top Critic Rafer Guzman is well-known for occasionally giving very, very low scores to films, to the point that even people who don't particularly care for the film in question tend to take notice ("come on, it can't be that bad"). The most well-known instance of this was him giving 0.5/4 to Rango without really stating why he disliked it.
  • In 2012, a Rotten review of The Wizard of Oz popped up, knocking away its 100% Tomatometer. Said review was salvaged from 1939, written by a critic who died in 1943. Everyone was (quite understandably) outraged.
  • Many people are frustrated from reading Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time reviews from many popular and well-known film reviewers.
  • Many fans were pretty angered with the poor reviews given to the highly anticipated film Suicide Squad (2016) so much, that a petition was created to shut down Rotten Tomatoes. However, most fans have not seen the film yet, since this was before its official release.
• Rod Hilton of The Editing Room gets a lot of flames in his message boards simply for having a movie poster liked on his site. For example, the worst of the hate mail for The Dark Knight have been removed, but it amounted to "How dare you make fun of the BEST MOVIE EVAR!" Never mind that he gave the movie 4 1/2 stars.
• A guaranteed eventuality for fans of Confused Matthew, who explicitly reviews movies he hates that were otherwise popular with others (and bad sequels to what he thought were good movies).
  • Amongst his targets, the otherwise highly praised The Lion King.
  • His panning of Spirited Away wasn't well-received to begin with, but the hate stems from his comparisons of the work of Studio Ghibli to Inuyasha because they're both from Japan.
  • Especially his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he considers being mostly meaningless dead air and only has one redeeming feature in the character HAL. He completely accepts most of this backlash, only taking issue with the idea that he only hated the film because it wasn't a Michael Bay style action fest. That review is so infamous that there are several hour-long rebuttal videos.
• Alison Gillmor, when writing for the Winnipeg Free Press, gave Titanic (1997) a negative review, and drew so much hate mail that she reported this in a subsequent column, and said something to the effect of "Sorry, I still don't like it".
  • U.S. critic Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) received similar hate mail when he panned the film and stood by that opinion even as the film became a massive hit, admitting in a subsequent piece that its huge success worried him because of the possibility that it would discourage filmmakers/studios from focusing on the quality of stories/screenplays in favor of spectacle. Finally, James Cameron himself chewed him out over it in print, saying that it wasn't his duty as a film critic to discuss a movie's flaws long after the audience had made up its collective mind about it.
• While many people praise RedLetterMedia's reviews of the Star Wars prequels, many Prequel fans have responded negatively to them. One fan even wrote a 108 page rebuttal to his Phantom Menace review, claiming it to be a review of lies and that Mike Stoklasa's arguments were weak.
  • In a notable case of He Didn't Pan It, Now He Sucks, in their Half in the Bag review, many RLM viewers - and co-star Jay Bauman - were quite shocked when Mike gave the critically divisive Jurassic World a positive review.
• British site Den of Geeks' 2-star review of Ted was poorly received. It turns out that someone who hates Seth MacFarlane, all of his shows, and everything he stands for was a bad choice to review MacFarlane's directorial debut. Who'd a thunk it?
• Movie Night starring Jonathan Paula, producer of Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?, is a movie review show that features both his reviews (typically two movies per show) as well as a selection of YouTube commentators, finishing with both his score and the viewer score for the movie. Typical YouTube comment flame wars can be predicted, but he doesn't help his case by using phrases like "[The viewers] look past these flaws" or "[X] was silly and has no place in a movie", leading to an increasing number of cries of snobbishness and seeming to look down on others for not being snobby enough.
  • He has also made unwarranted claims, often lumping movies into the wrong genre like thinking The Hobbit was supposed to be a "popcorn action flick", or trying to contrast films that have drastically different styles and focus like a standard romantic comedy and a serious period piece instead of letting each movie stand on its own.
• YouTube movie reviewer Kiara Strings gave a negative review of Matilda. The response was exactly what you think. (Even though she asked on Facebook and Twitter if she should review it with the response being yes.)
• Mr TARDIS Reviews is a frequent recipient of this.
  • His reviews of the Twilight movies get this from the franchise's fans and even some detractors who felt he went way too far in bashing the books and their fans.
  • He gave The Amazing Spider-Man a negative review, which produced backlash from the film's fan-base. It doesn't help that he never stops talking about it and making comparisons to it.
  • His So Okay, It's Average verdict on The Dark Knight Rises has gotten him some flak from the film's fans.
  • His negative review of Star Trek Into Darkness earned him some ire.
• Animation historian and critic AniMat gets a lot of flak for sharing his distaste for Sony Pictures Animation films and SPA in general, specifically the Hotel Transylvania films and the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs series for their heavy use of cartoony squash-and-stretch animation that he feels has no place in theatrical film, even going as far as to call Cloudy 2 not only one of his least favorite films, but one of the worst animated films ever.
• Amateur YouTube reviewer Quality Control did a negative review on Interstella 5555. It was SO poorly received that it's literally the only review he ever did, and he hasn't done any activity since 2010. Part of why it's so hated is the factual errors and lack of good review techniques, as well as the beginning when he says that Daft Punk is retarded. However, it's likely that Quality Control was a one-off done by another reviewer to make fun of Caustic Critic stereotypes.
• A classic case was when Bosley Crowther in The New York Times went after Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 with such negative zeal to the point where he jabbed anyone who disagreed with him. As the film gained more and more admiration for its daring innovations, many of the other major critics like Pauline Kael, who had been irritated with him in the past, took it as an excuse to criticize Crowther so severely that he was replaced as movie critic before the end of the year.
• The Last Angry Geek received a lot of backlash from people for saying he didn't like Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) in his vlog for the movie, saying that he thought the characters were played up too much for comedy and that the characterizations were different from the ones from his favorite run of the team.
• The late British film critic Leslie Halliwell published many volumes of his capsule film reviews, which were noted for being consistently negative towards modern-day (post-1960) motion pictures, a fact noted by media outlets such as the Chicago Tribute. Ironically, Halliwell's "day job" was buying American TV shows for broadcast on Britain's ITV, including shows such as Charlie's Angels and The A-Team.
• YourMovieSucks.org and his distaste for most mainstream movies are a prime example of this, with his indifference towards Marvel movies, the Star Wars franchise and many of Pixar's movies post-Up being infamous.
• WatchMojo's "Top 10 Reasons Why the Star Wars Prequels Suck" video received such a backlash, they had to retitle it "Top 10 Reasons Why the Star Wars Prequels Are Hated". It didn't help much, as the video garnered over 18000 dislikes (against 3000 likes) in two weeks, and Reddit r/prequelmemes members flooded the comment section with parodied prequel quotes mocking the channel. The original title can still be seen on the WatchMojo website.
• Director Martin Scorsese received immense flack when he said that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was "not cinema" and compared them to theme park rides. This not only lead to fans speaking out against him, but also the cast and crew rebutted his remarks.
• Being a Caustic Critic, not everyone likes The Critical Drinker's reviews. His takes on Black Panther (2018), Midsommar and Creed have especially sparked criticism of him anyplace there's a discussion about film. His tendency to preemptively condemn a film or show, long before its actual release, has also earned him criticism for how premature doing so is.
• Surprisingly, We Hate Movies has averted this trope, as the four hosts openly say they're not offering a definitive take everyone should agree with and "it's OK to like a movie." Their We Love Movies series also helps them avoid this, because they give the same mocking treatment to movies that all of them enjoy.
• YouTuber 24 Frames of Nick received a lot of flak when he reviewed Khumba. The biggest reason the video received lots of backlash because of his irrational claims of it ripping off Madagascar when the movies have nothing in common or anything to do with each other. Never mind that Marty the Zebra is not the main character of Madagascar (Alex the lion is), or that he keeps calling the animal characters by the wrong names (he calls Phango a lion and not a leopard) and only barely provides any proper criticism against the film.

Literature

• Ana Mardoll was once very popular within the Twilight hatedom because of xer critical reviews of Twilight. However, xie began to alienate more than just Twilight fans after xer reviews of The Chronicles of Narnia, which are a childhood favorite of many readers. Not that the criticism is necessarily unjust, but it is surprising how many Unfortunate Implications people can point out if they read through a book with a fine-toothed comb instead of just reading it for entertainment. Whether the condemnation that the work attracts, as a result, is justified or not is pretty much entirely in the eye of the beholder.
• In 2000, an eminent critic by the name of Harold Bloom wrote an infamous essay decrying Harry Potter as a terrible series read by the Lowest Common Denominator that epitomized the dumbing-down of our culture. Cue a storm of angry letters — but this backlash is justified, because in another essay, he claimed that whenever a character took a walk, J. K. Rowling always used the "cliche"^note Note that in literary studies the term "cliche" refers to an overused phrase rather than an overused idea of "stretching their legs", and ranted about how Rowling used this "cliche" so often he began taking notes of the number of times people "stretched their legs" in the first book and finally gave up because it was used so often. Fans looked it up...and found the phrase "stretching his legs" was used a grand total of once in the entire series. In Chapter 1 of Book 1. Which makes this a definite case of Complaining About Books You Don't Read.
• Blogger Hanna Rosin of Slate wrote a negative article about The Berenstain Bears following Jan Berenstain's death (even going as far as to say "good riddance" to the beloved children's author). Cue readers angrily calling her out on the "too soon" status of the article and the insensitive tone she took. She subsequently apologized for the tone, but some didn't accept the apology.

Live-Action TV

• British reviewer Charlie Brooker often does this in reverse by professing fandom of shows his readers tend to sneer at such as Friends and Little Britain. More conventionally, there was probably some surprise when he panned Monkey Dust in his Screen Burn column.
• iCarly:
  • This was the in-universe reaction to Freddie's criticism of the Fred videos.
  • Fandom version when the Word of God Author Tract via Carly in "iStart A Fan War" showed Dan Schneider wasn't exactly happy with the Shipping focus of it. Cue flames, people threatening to stop watching, people who'd been doing episode reviews quitting, and internet backdraft all over.
• SF Debris again. After giving the much-loved Voyager episode "Body and Soul" a 6, he says he knows he's pissing off a lot of people right now, but with comedy episodes the one true criteria is if you find them funny, and he just doesn't, even with Jeri Ryan's great performance as the Doctor controlling Seven's body.
• Troy Patterson of Slate is... not a fan of fantasy. Thus, his review of Game of Thrones was not so much a review as much as it was essentially an over-900-words-long stream-of-consciousness commentary on his lack of interest in the show and for the fantasy genre in general. The response, to say the least, was vitriolic, and comments on the review (before they were disabled and removed) mainly consisted of angry fans either bashing Patterson for "not getting it" or asking why he was even reviewing the show if he wasn't going to like it to begin with. Patterson was so rattled by the experience he recused himself from further reviews of the series.
  • Bernard Cornwell made a comment about Game of Thrones as "very, very dull". Though it's not cleared if he's talking about the show or the books it's based on or both, but it's possible he's talking about the former as he complains about the Sexposition which is started by the show. Of course, he got a lot of backlash from fans including those who liked his books. It's ironic that George R. R. Martin himself interviewed Cornwell a few years ago and even recommended his fans to read Cornwell's books.
• Jon Stewart has said in interviews that he's frequently had people come up to him and say that they loved his show until it made fun of a particular topic.
• Inevitably, many Australian media figures whose actions have been criticized by Media Watch have expressed a deep hatred of the show, most prominently radio personality Alan Jones. Media Watch themselves respond in a scathingly lighthearted manner about the complaints.
• Mr TARDIS Reviews
  • Got this after his negative review of Come Fly With Me. He eventually made a response video to one user who was using his negative review to troll him mercilessly.
  • Whenever he makes a negative review of a Doctor Who episode (especially those written by Steven Moffat), the Doctor Who fanbase being what it is, many will start slamming him.
• When Darren Franich and Kristen Baldwin of Entertainment Weekly not only panned Netflix's The Witcher (2019) but also bragged about only watching two of the five episodes made available (and not even in order), they were utterly destroyed by readers and other critics for doing a terrible job at their jobs.
• Fans of Wheel of Fortune have much disdain for BuzzerBlog because the site never has anything nice to say about Wheel. Unlike other game shows, BuzzerBlog's articles about Wheel are usually clickbait content about a controversial judgment call or a puzzle with questionable subject matter.
• Game Show Garbage: Cyndi Seidelman has received some flak for her constant bashing of Jeopardy!. It got to the point where her audience couldn't tell whether its April Fools induction was authentic, or if she was kidding. She has since been nicer to the show after Alex Trebek's death in November 2020.

Music

• Internet comedian Adam Buckley has torn apart many songs on his YouTube channel A Dose of Buckley (though he frequently emphasizes that he doesn't consider himself a serious music critic and is first and foremost a comedian). Normally, he gets praised for his harsh reviews of recent music hits, but on multiple occasions he's angered his viewers when trashing popular songs such as "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People, "Psycho" by Muse, "Ain't It Fun" by Paramore, "Tonight Tonight" by Hot Chelle Rae, "7 Years" by Lukas Graham, "We Are Young" by Fun, "Breezeblocks" by alt-J, "Turn Blue" by The Black Keys, "Praying" by Kesha, the entire discographies of Coldplay, Radiohead, Kings of Leon and Mumford & Sons, and many other artists and songs.
• Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop often gets this.
  • By far, his most infamous review is of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, giving it a 6/10, a shock to what many would consider not only the best album of 2010, but arguably the best album of the 2010s. To this day, he gets requests from fans to either re-review the album or gets asked whether his opinion had changed (which it hasn't).
  • His bashing of The Weeknd's debut mixtape, House of Balloons, is just as infamous if not more, especially with The Weeknd's rise in popularity since 2015. New fans digging up old reviews may be shocked to discover Anthony's early disinterest towards Abel.
  • Artists such as Steven Wilson, Opeth, J. Cole, and Childish Gambino have mostly garnered mixed-to-negative reviews from him. Fan backlash is to be expected.
  • The scathing review of Arctic Monkeys' AM is particularly despised by fans of the band.
  • His Channel Orange review also gets this a lot, despite that he gave it a Strong 7 (which is quite a good score).
  • His mixed review of Hiatus Kaiyote's Choose Your Weapon did not also get a positive reception, with many questioning whether or not he fully listened to the album.
  • And then there was his 7/10 review for Kendrick Lamar's DAMN., which despite being mostly positive and even being included on the list of his favorite albums of 2017, drew massive uproar from TDE fans. Not helping matters was giving the same grade to the self-titled mixtape of the routinely mocked Lil Pump. Fantano has even mocked the outrage on Twitter a bunch of times.
  • The review of Salem's debut album King Night, and of Witchhouse as a whole, is currently sitting on a like-to-dislike ratio of 50/50 presumably due to angry fans upset that he doesn't "get" the point of the genre. Many commenters have taken to calling him a "normie" due to not enjoying an admittedly harsh sounding style of music.
  • Mac Miller's extremely personal and beloved album Swimming was the subject one of Fantano's most controversial takes to date. The review has aged even worse in hindsight due to Mac Miller's tragic early death at the age of 26. Fantano likely maintains his 3/10 despite the tragic circumstances of Mac Miller's death, as he has defended giving negative reviews of artists who recently passed away in 2017, after Chester Bennington's shocking death.
    • He also has since given Miller's spiritual successor to Swimming, Circles, a highly positive review.
• Mark Grondin, otherwise known as Spectrum Pulse, drew the wrath of many teenage girls when he panned Shawn Mendes's Handwritten and especially Illuminate. Mark didn't seem phased by it though, even welcoming the anger, and you can check out some "highlights" from the latter's comment section here.
  • He did receive heat for his review of Twenty One Pilots' Vessel. The grade he gave it: 8/10.
  • In the pop world, fans of Lana Del Rey, Melanie Martinez or Fifth Harmony (and by extension, Camila Cabello) didn't exactly take kindly his negative reviews of their favorite albums of all time. Lana Del Rey, in particular, was the subject of two of his most negative reviews in Honeymoon and Ultraviolence, the latter of which is one of his most hated albums he's had to review.
  • A lot of the negative country music reviews have inspired a fair amount of "colorful" comments from angry country music fans. He's noted that such comments often contain a degree of xenophobia, at times claiming that, as a Canadian, he's not qualified to judge and criticize country music (ignoring Canada's own country music traditions).
  • His review of Megadeth's Dystopia didn't go well with fans either, although it probably didn't help that he admitted to not really liking Megadeth at the start of the review, even their earlier albums.
  • In terms of rock reviews, there's a bevy of them but notable examples are Tame Impala's Currents, Wolf Alice's My Love is Cool, Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, alt-J's Relaxer, Nothing but Thieves' Broken Machine, and Young the Giant's Mind Over Matter.
  • Tyler, the Creator's IGOR and Weyes Blood's Titanic Rising, two of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2019...6/10.
  • In the inverse of the trope, he drew backlash for actually defending Chance the Rapper's critically panned debut album, The Big Day, even giving it a 7/10.
  • He admitted in his review of Fear Inoculum that he is not a fan of tool in the slightest — and that, by saying so, he expected to get inundated with dislikes and negative reviews (He was right).
  • A non-album review example: when Mark analyzed and critiqued BTS' sales tactics on an episode of Billboard Breakdown, not only did the ARMY responded with flooding the video with dislikes and comments bashing him (and attempted to hack his social media), but he was a focal point on an article on Forbes accusing critics of undermining their popularity (for which later received an edit after Mark wrote a corrective email to the writer of the article). Mark would end up addressing the backlash at the start of the following episode. He said it was the third-worst backlash he'd ever faced, behind only the Mendes Army's backlash and the time he was physically attacked at a Black Metal concert by a fan of a band he criticized who recognized him.
  • Another non-album review example: Mark drew some backlash when he put "Surface Pressure" at #2 in his Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2022 list, while stating his dislike for Encanto and its music.
• Fans of Limp Bizkit and Nickelback were not happy with Rocked's Regretting the Past videos on these respective artists. He even brings up that he got death threats for insulting the former in his video on All the Right Reasons.
• Like other Channel Awesome-affiliated personalities listed here, Todd in the Shadows has been on the receiving end of this.
  • He predicted that this trope would be invoked when he placed "All the Right Moves" by OneRepublic at #3 in his list of the "Top 6 Worst Songs of 2010 (That [he] Didn't Review)".
  Todd: Oh, I'm not gonna make any fans for this one.
  • Todd also got some pretty harsh backlash from frustrated Electronic Music fans after calling the genre "meaningless", "repetitive" and "having no personality to it" in some of his 2013 music reviews. To a lesser extent, he's also gotten torn apart by fans of the Nu Metal genre for calling every band in the genre as "sounding all the same" in his "Smooth Criminal" episode of One Hit Wonderland.
  • He also got flamed to hell and back by Fall Out Boy fans for putting their comeback single "My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark (Light 'Em Up)" in his "Worst Songs of 2013" video (it didn't help that he also called the band members "assholes"). He even referenced this in a few later videos.
  • Some of Todd's non-American viewers seem to be getting increasingly annoyed by his constant portrayal of the Eurovision Song Contest as a bastion of talentlessness. Especially because, half the time, the terrible music is what makes it entertaining.
  • In addition, his scathing criticism of all pre-My Chemical Romance Emo Music, which he labeled as music by whiny and annoying people who sing about first-world problems, was grossly inaccurate and as such prompted plenty of backlash. It didn't help that he used Simple Plan and Hawthorne Heights (two bands that have been huge punching bags even within the Emo community) as examples. What Todd didn't realize is that those are emo-pop bands; proper emo bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Glassjaw, Thrice, Brand New, At the Drive-In, and Thursday sing about a wide range of profound, thought-provoking and often personal topics with great artistry and intellectual depth, and none of them have released a single song about "whining about their moms", as Todd put it. In addition, My Chemical Romance didn't even invent the theatrical, Goth-influenced brand of emo that Todd likes - AFI had been doing the same thing a decade earlier. Todd's obvious ignorance about a highly diverse genre couldn't have not made people angry.
  • No huge backlash as of yet, but while discussing an aesthetic he calls "taking shit too seriously in the 1990s", one of the albums he says has that aesthetic is Jeff Buckley's Grace.
• Daren Jackson, aka The Rap Critic, was not immune from backlash as seen when he gave a 0 out of 5 to rapper NF's breakout song, "Real".
  • He and Marc Mues got flack for their back-to-back negative reviews of Pusha T's DAYTONA and Death Grips' The Money Store. In the case of the latter, they apologized and explained that they were not familiar with the subgenre and even promised to re-review the album in the future. However, they didn't take back saying that DAYTONA was "boring" and "unfinished".
  • In a rather interesting case, Daren actually heavily defended Eminem's critically panned Revival from both Marc and guest speaker, Kill Bill, even after rating the album higher than BROCKHAMPTON's Saturation III. He actually got more backlash in his review of Eminem's follow-up, Kamikaze, when he said that he would rate the album "lower than Revival".
• A good chunk of the entry for Dave Marsh on The Other Wiki is made up of unfavorable remarks he's made about various performers over the years.
• Howard Stern caused a lot of outrage (and inadvertently further gained fame) within the Hispanic community when he criticized the music of Selena, who was shot and killed by her former friend Yolanda Saldívar three days prior. Stern had stated that: "This music does absolutely nothing for me. Alvin and the Chipmunks have more soul ... Spanish people have the worst taste in music. They have no depth." He later apologized for what he had said but many refused to accept the apology.
• Doug Walker got this from fans of Phil Collins in his Disneycember reviews of Tarzan and Brother Bear. Not helping was how he said "fuck Phil Collins" like as if he had a grudge against him personally.
• In 2012, a columnist for a Massachusetts college newspaper published an article called "Let's stop pretending we like techno music". In it, he says that techno music can't be considered real music, that a computer isn't an instrument, and that "Any Joe Schmo with a "MacBook Pro and a Wi-Fi connection can create techno]]". He goes on to accuse every single techno fan of not actually liking the genre and only pretending to so that they can go to techno shows to get high on drugs. Keep in mind, Techno is but one genre in the Electronic Music umbrella, with the term having been used as a catch-all term (he was likely thinking of something along the lines of EDM or Dubstep), so he was complaining about nothing. The review is universally hated, and the comment section is filled with hundreds of angry fans.
• The Double Agent:
  • An interesting case where he received the backlash from himself is his inclusion of 50 Cent's much-loved "In Da Club" on "The Top 20 Worst #1 Hits of the 2000s". He backed down later on when he realized his complaints were largely about Fiddy's poor enunciation, which he couldn't really help. ^note He was shot in the mouth a few years before he recorded the song, which meant he talked in more of a mumble.
  • He didn't, however, apologize for criticizing the production and performance of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." in "The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1985."
• Hip-Hop review collective, Dead End Hip-Hop, pissed off a ton of J. Cole fans with their mixed review of KOD, to the point where they addressed the backlash with a follow-up episode of AskDEHH.
  • On an episode of his show on his channel, 'Out of My Element', regular member Myke C-Town drew massive heat when reviewing Kero Kero Bonito's debut album, not understanding the hype behind the album and thinking the album was only enjoyed ironically.
• The Music Video Show lampshades this trope during the last part of the Mötley Crüe episode.
• Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro got a lot of backlash for trashing John Lennon's Imagine, complaining about the song's morality and saying, "And anybody who believes the crap in this song, anybody who believes the crap in this song, you should never have a conversation with them. It's a waste of your time, it's a waste of your brain power. I am not a censor; this song should exist. But, if I were a censor, I would take every copy of this song, and I would take it to a bonfire and I would burn it."
• Slayer is generally one of Heavy Metal's Sacred Cow acts, so metal singer Floor Jansen annoyed a lot of people when she mentioned in an interview that she thought them "a dreadful band".

Professional Wrestling

• Former YouTuber Worst Wrestling Themes came under fire for posting Disturbed's version of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's theme as part of his "Worst Wrestling Themes" series. This was not an April Fools' joke like when he posted "Voices", Randy Orton's theme, as part of the WWT series; he actually did not like this theme. He predicted the inevitable reaction in the description by asking for people to let him know if they unsubscribed because of the video.
• Dave Scherer started his The Wrestling Lariat newsletter partially in response to Dave Meltzer writing a less than glowing review of a major ECW show in The Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

Video Games

• As one reviewer/critic who lives off Accentuate the Negative, Yahtzee gets quite a lot of flaming hate mail:
  • A particularly notable case occurred when he panned Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and devoted an entire episode the very next week to address some of the backlash that was chucked his way. Yahtzee knows there are certain types of games that he just doesn't enjoy and would be unnecessarily harsh towards, even by his standards, so he deliberately avoids reviewing them. Brawl was one of these; he only reviewed it because of immense pressure from his fans practically begging him to do so. He references this in his review of Borderlands.
    Yahtzee: I've been here too many times before; I delay reviewing a game, and all the fans of the game feel that the only possible explanation is that I'm struck dumb by how good it is, but they nag me to review it anyway to confirm their feelings. And then of course I piddle all over it, in an act that you'd think would come as no surprise to anyone, and the wounded, denial-ridden nerd mob leave hate comments suggesting that I must have misinterpreted my own opinion!
  • One fan video reviewing Yahtzee's Art of Theft in the style of Zero Punctuation lampshaded this:
    "Try to keep your accent, because the moment you replace 'bollocks' with 'crikey' you'll probably lose half your audience. Or will that be when you critically review Spore?"
• IGN has had reviewers that did not give properly balanced reviews or did not pay proper attention to the elements of the games they reviewed, resulting in mockery and lambasting of the reviewers in question. For a time, this actually resulted in the rather insulting meme "You cannot spell 'IGNorant without IGN' floating around the internet:
  • They gave Sonic Unleashed for the Xbox 360 a lower score than the maligned Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) on the same system, which is usually considered by many to be significantly worse than the former game.
  • While fan response to Sonic and the Black Knight was mixed, IGN's review of the game (the game received a 3.9, the lowest rating ever from IGN for a Sonic game) was derided even by people who didn't like the game because the review makes it obvious IGN only played half the game.
  • The infamous IGN review that gave God Hand an abysmal 3.0 score is generally regarded as the worst piece of writing to ever be posted up on their site, and part of the reason the game flopped despite having such a cult following. Problems include complaining about things that aren't in the game and saying it's bad because it's too hard, finding the sense of humor to be weak, and other issues that make it seem like they hadn't played the game for more than a few hours. The review itself was also poorly written with multiple spelling errors that have gone unfixed to this day.
  • Their review of Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Even though they gave it a good rating (7.8/10), the reviewer got a fair amount of backlash. At the time, IGN's reviews had their scores accompanied with a list of pros and cons bullet points that summarize the review; in this case, the reviewer had her issues with the tediousness of the water routes in the latter half of the game and the imbalance of water Pokémon boiled down to "too much water". This spawned many memes, like the idea that IGN is made of Team Magma members, or sarcastically giving good games scores of 7.8/10, and proceeding to list minor flaws with them.^note A pretty hypocritical move, considering that her criticisms against the game had always been a common complaint about the Hoenn-based games, long before the IGN review. The fact that IGN had given the original games a perfect 10/10 is rarely brought up when mocking this review, surprisingly.
  • IGN gave Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky a 4.9/10. The person who reviewed it had not even gotten past Apple Woods when he had done the review. On the website, he described the gameplay as lazy and dated and gave it the same criticism as the previous two versions, Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness, criticising their presentation and graphics for reusing assets from their GBA predecessor. Despite the fact that Explorers of Sky improved on the previous two games by providing special episodes that expanded on some of the recurring side characters, added some new functions and gave Grovyle, Celebi, and Dusknoir a happy ending. Since it's considered the best game in the series and fans loved it, this wasn't received well.
  • IGN gave Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam a rather harsh 5.9. One of the biggest criticisms they gave it was the writing, which many people (including other game reviewers) consider to be the game's strongest suit. Combining that with the fact that they gave the more-disliked Paper Mario: Sticker Star an 8.0, this enraged a large number of people and resulted in Nintendo fans losing a lot of respect for the site.
• GamesRadar has been viewed this way for their less-than-forthcoming outlook on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, especially when one considers their hatred of Sonic to be a Running Gag, along with their fanatical obsession with Ōkami and the "Wife Arm". There are also complaints that they didn't finish the final version of Sonic Unleashed before reviewing it. And it appears they didn't finish Sonic and the Black Knight either. Their review of Fire Emblem Engage was criticized for giving the game two and a half stars out of five for the lackluster story and supports, as while a good portion of the fans agree with those criticisms, not everyone thinks it justifies scoring it that low.
• Annie Gallagher of Guardian Acorn got this reaction in her reviews of New Super Mario Bros. U, Bravely Default, The Last of Us, and especially Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Game Trailers got this for a harsh review of Sonic Colors, which was apparently due to either playing with an unfinished version or not using one of the alternate control schemes that would've made it more comfortable for the reviewer to play.
• Internet troll Gligar 13 Vids tends to get a lot of flack for his negative reviews of popular and/or critically acclaimed video games, especially Nintendo and Sonic the Hedgehog games.
• ScrewAttack:
  • Stuttering Craig and Handsome Tom got a good amount of hate for their best and worst Sonic games. Mostly for bashing on Sonic R.
  • In one Video Game Vault, they poked fun at the popular Asterix series. This didn't go over well with fans, who thought Stuttering Craig was panning the game (he wasn't).
  • They made a video called "Top Ten Franchises That Need to Just Die", which included popular franchises like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. You can imagine the backlash they received from fans of those series.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd:
  • Got this back in his early days, when he panned Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. His FAQ points out that the character wasn't fully formed when he made that video, and therefore he picked up a good game and ripped it a new one as something for himself and his friends out of boredom. He didn't upload the first two episodes until much later.
  • A number of people were outraged at his actions during "Castlevania 64", including his handling of the infamous Nitro puzzle. Unfortunately, he stops the review after being stuck on said puzzle and moves to the other Castlevania Games next episode.
  • A few people were outraged at his review of Milon's Secret Castle. Those people were also probably the only ones who ever played the game.
  • He also got quite a bit of backlash for his Battletoads review, even though he stated multiple times throughout the review, and even in the trailer, that it's a good game, just not a good two-player game.
  • Just glaring at a Mischief Makers cartridge during an intro got him into hot water. He would later vow to never review that game. Ironically, the cartridge was donated by a fan of the show so that the Nerd could bash it.
  • A day after his review on Metal Gear was released on YouTube, the video was suddenly flagged for unknown reasons, probably because some Metal Gear fans were a bit angry with his criticism of the game. This is ironic because the particular version he reviewed was the poorly-made NES port. And he, at one point, even called the original version "a great game", and makes it clear that he considers the rest of the series great as well.
• X-Play:
  • Their special presentation: "Your Childhood Sucked: Final Fantasy VII." The sounds of long-time fans gnashing their teeth could be heard across the globe. Though since one of the things it bashes the 1997 game for is its early 3D graphics not being up to par with the modern standards of games made a decade later... there had to be some trolling going on in there.
  • In a non-JRPG example, X-Play gave the massively hyped Resident Evil 5 a 3/5, touching off a massive backlash.
  • They also got tons of backlash from Dragon Ball Z and Fullmetal Alchemist for giving their respective spin-off games low scores.
  • They received flak from Naruto and Bleach fans due to them mispronouncing the names and making fun of the series and characters rather than the games itself, though these games are pretty good. Several years later, they answered an e-mail saying they purposely mock anime fans when they review the games because they love getting the hate mail. They also said they loved the Naruto games even though they weren't fans of the anime itself. Note that this was before the series was even in America.
  • Adam Sessler did a whole segment dealing with the negative reaction when X-Play reviewed Killzone 2, with accusations that Microsoft paid him off in order to not upset the dominance the Halo franchise had and that he was being unfairly negative towards the game. And what was the score he gave to Killzone 2? A perfect 5/5!. According to the comments he read in Sessler's Soapbox, the reason the PS3 fanboys were upset with his were because 1) he wasn't positive enough about the game, 2) he paused at a couple of moments in his review, implying sarcasm, and 3) his intonation wasn't correct. He eventually ended the review of the comments of his review by telling people, in no uncertain terms, to get off their high horses.
  • X-Play seemed to had a deep hatred for Dynasty Warriors. They received a lot of hate when they gave DW5 Empires, widely regarded as being one of the best games in the series, the same score as the black sheep of the series.
  • X-Play had a list of things they wish they could kill, with not just games but mechanics as well. This included 3D Castlevania games, the aforementioned Dynasty Warriors series, and the entire Sonic series.
• Video game journalist Jeff Gerstmann, when he worked for GameSpot, gave the Wii version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess an 8.8 out of 10. Ironically, he gave the GameCube version an 8.9, despite his entire rationale for his scoring of the Wii version (which for the record is only "low" by comparison to what reviewers at other publications gave it) being that he considered it a lazy port that took minimal advantage of the Wii's unique controls. In his GameCube version review, he knocked it for being inferior to the Wii version...that he scored lower than the GameCube version.
• Tom McShea of GameSpot got flak for giving The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword a 7.5, in comparison to the 10s to 8s that the game had gotten from other reviewers. He was critic of the game's linearity and frequent backtracking, but the fact that he considered the controls to be bad was a point of contention with many fans and outlets, especially since he didn't realize that the game didn't use IR pointing and was trying to play it like Twilight Princess, even though the game lets players know early on that the direction of their swings will be important.
• Before the Network Decay, the G4TV show Filter panned the Cult Classic Shenmue. In fact, they considered it the second worst game ever, just below a Zelda CDi game. Ironically, Filter also ranked Shenmue the third-best Dreamcast game ever.
• The Wiiviewer got this for his reviews of Kirby's Adventure and StarTropics. Though he did pedal back on those reviews and decided to like the games while explaining his criticisms.
• To say that fans of Dragon's Crown didn't take kindly to Kotaku's Jason Schrier panning the game for its female character designs would be an understatement. Even the game's lead developer, George Kamitani, got in on the action, throwing out a Facebook post◊ insinuating Schrier liked men.
• The Spoony One:
  • His vocal dislike of Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy X got him all sorts of flames. As both games have respectably-sized fanbases, it was to be expected. It probably doesn't help that Spoony has admitted he does the newer Final Fantasy reviews mainly to troll, so he wants this response.
  • And then there was the almighty hissy fit the Deadliest Warrior fanbase threw when he panned its tie-in game. The backlash resulted in several straight weeks of trolling on the Spoony Experiment forums and comments section from irate fans, prompting Spoony to do a follow-up video... which wasn't any kinder than the first one.
• Game Informer gets a lot of this for its "annual" Sacred Cow Barbecue, explaining why popular games (even the ones they praised) suck. While it is done in a joking manner and meant to "knock some of gaming's most revered icons off their high and mighty pedestals," there are readers who cancel their subscriptions to the magazine.
  • Their initial negative review of Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, was evidently not a joke, and fans went justifiably ballistic because the magazine —for reasons still at large— tapped a reviewer who admitted to both preferring twitch/action games and detesting Survival Horror as a genre. While the logic behind this choice was somewhat sound (i.e. "If this guy likes it, then it must be great!"), assigning the review to a writer with an open bias against games like it also had a very obvious flaw (i.e. "If this guy hates it, that might not mean it's actually terrible."). Their continued potshots at the game and disbelief at its sales numbers in several subsequent issues didn't help in smoothing things over, either. Game Informer would subsequently praise the game in retrospective articles, and unlike many of their other "retro" reviews, they never even bothered to archive it, indicating they want it to remain forgotten.
• The Irate Gamer gets this a lot. Among these are his reviews of Aladdin, Tekken 6, Ghosts 'n Goblins, and Super Mario Bros. 2. Furthermore, the entirety of his fifth season is all about tearing apart NES games considered classics.
• YouTube "Top Ten" writer Josh Scorcher, a.k.a. "The Fiery Joker":
  • He has got this after saying that Ōkami sucks. He later made a video talking about why he didn't like the game.
  • He re-did his Top Ten Overrated Games list, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 changed its spot from the middle range.... to number 2. While it's possible that Josh had changed his mind on what he thinks of the game at the time of remaking that list, he admits in his Top Ten Games I Want To Like list that some of the reasons he dislikes Super Mario Galaxy 2 are just him being spiteful. That didn't save him from backlash.
  • Josh got hate for everything in his "Top 10 Overrated Games" list, to the point where people even said they wanted to kill him. Halo 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops are some of the most infamous examples.
• YouTube "Top Ten" writer peanut3423, a.k.a. "The Autarch of Flame", has gotten hate after putting the Mega Man series in his "Top Five Games I Hate That Everyone Likes" list. The description for the video was later edited saying that he was not proud of the list as a whole and that he made some bad judgment, and later made a video of Hades, from Kid Icarus: Uprising, making fun of his countdown as a whole. His collab review of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword with Rabbid Luigi also got a lot of hate because the two criticized the game very harshly.
• YouTube "Top Ten" writer superflipper76 (a.k.a. "The Phoenix King") got hate for saying in multiple videos that he hated Conker's Bad Fur Day. It got even worse when he made a whole video about it where he claimed that it killed Rare.
• YouTube "Top Ten" writer AnimalGuy001, a.k.a. "Fawful's Minion":
  • He got all kinds of hate for saying in his Top 5 Pokemon Generations that he couldn't stand Pokémon Red and Blue saying they were filled with glitches, and needed almost no strategy, even though he agreed that they were great for their time.
  • While less noticeable, as so far he only said this in comments and his Q and A site, he also got some for stating his dislike for the Final Fantasy series, especially Final Fantasy VII.
  • He even pointed out this page on his video to Pokémon X and Y.
• Rabbidluigi
  • He came under fire from Neptunia fans after he ranked Hyperdimension Neptunia #3 on his Top Ten Worst JRPGs video, when compared to other more notorious JRPGs like Quest 64 and vanilla Final Fantasy XIV. While it's understandable why he added it on the list since the first game in the series is considered to be terrible, he didn't specify this at the start and most of his points seem to be directed at the series in general. This set Neptunia fans off the wrong way because they thought Rabbidluigi was panning the series as a whole, especially considering that it's often regarded as a Cult Classic due to the vast improvements it received following the first game. He also received a bit of flak for putting Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation on the list with fans claiming that, while the game is a Contested Sequel, it is far from the being among other bad JRPGs like the aforementioned Quest 64 and vanilla FFXIV.
  • The comments of his Crash Bandicoot rankings video are full of people raging over him ranking Crash Twinsanity as the worst of the 3D platformers as well as lower than games like Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage and the Titans duology with many saying that although they admit that the game is flawed, it is nowhere near as bad as he makes it out to be. His comment about the music being bad also got a lot of ire.
• Bhaalspawn (who would start going by the name Lily Orchard years later) posted a review on her Tumblr blog stating her dislike for Team Fortress 2. She got some hate, but not that much. Then YouTube "Top Ten" writer Josh Scorcher made a response to that review, and had a link taking the viewers to Bhaalspawn's Tumblr page. The hate Bhaalspawn got grew rapidly. Less than a week later Josh made a rather angry Unscripted telling the people to stop sending hate messages to Bhaalspawn.
• Victor Lucas of Reviews on the Run rated Super Smash Bros. Melee a 2.0 out of 10, prompting a quick and negative response from the fans. Later, when reviewing Brawl, Victor mentions that he "got SO much hate mail" for rating Melee so low.
• GamePro:
  • In 1998, they took a lot of heat for panning two otherwise highly-regarded PlayStation games: Grand Theft Auto and (especially) Xenogears. Needless to say, fan reaction was not good.
  • They did it again roughly one year later by giving Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete a 2.5 fun factor. Fan reaction was about what you'd expect.
• Retsupurae got this for their commentaries on the King's Quest games, particularly King's Quest VI, which a lot of people are fond of. This also happened with their review of Alone in the Dark (1992), which some people felt was unfair since they spent a lot of time criticizing things that were a result of its age, such as the graphics.
• JonTron:
  • He caught a good bit of flak with his "Top 10 Overrated Video Games" list, in which he bashed games like Metroid Prime, Left 4 Dead, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the basis that he feels they get too much-undeserved praise.^note The last one, in particular, was seen as being hypocritical when it was revealed that Jon's all-time favorite video game is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the highest selling and most critically acclaimed Zelda game even a decade after he made the video. However, it's worth noting that the video has become Creator Backlash, and it has been removed from his main channel (it even once had the description on Normal Boots changed to "This video is now in Hell, where it belongs"), now only viewable via uploads from fans who saved the video. It was removed because of both fan backlash and Jon admitting that his opinions on some of the games have since changed after going back and playing them in a less critical light (this video was even joked about in his Mighty Max review, where the possessed Mighty Max SNES cartridge called out Jon for "making videos [he] is not proud of").
  • He caught flak from his fans when he stated on Twitter that he felt underwhelmed by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game that was otherwise receiving rapturous praise from most other gaming outlets and reviewers at the time.
• Egoraptor, a.k.a. Arin Hanson, animator and one half of the Let's Play video series Game Grumps, catches a good bit of flak from fans anytime he mentions he doesn't think very highly of certain well-liked video games:
  • He once said he thinks the Sonic Adventure games are just as bad as the highly hated Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (something former Not So Grump, the aforementioned JonTron, called Arin out on and highly disagreed), said BioShock Infinite was So Okay, It's Average (though that would become a more popular stance as time passed), doesn't like Skyrim because he thinks first-person perspective games, in general, are overdone (despite Skyrim being an RPG as opposed to a shooter and the first person view being optional anyway)^note however, Arin later noted that he actually suffers from motion sickness easily, so his dislike of first person games is less from hating the mechanics and moreso that he legitimately gets ill from the experience, often complains that modern Super Mario Bros. games are "soulless" and don't have enough new stuff to be fun^note though it probably should be noted he seems to be referring more to the New Super Mario Bros. series of games, which are purposely made to be throwbacks to the Mario 2D platformers of old, as he did like Super Mario Sunshine, during Magfest once said he doesn't like Super Mario 3D World (a game that's been praised by many gamers and critics alike for being one of the Wii U's early defining games) and may not play it on the show because of this^note which ended up Hilarious in Hindsight, as it was one of the games played on Game Grumps, and seems to dislike most Zelda games released after A Link to the Past, (in particular voicing dislike for Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword)^note though he appears to at least have a liking for Wind Waker, as evidenced by the Game Grumps' playthrough of the HD remake on Wii U.
  • His criticism of Ocarina was lampshaded in Sequelitis:
    Arin: I am criticizing Ocarina of Time on the Internet. I'm gonna get CRUCIFIED.
  • He also once called Turtles in Time, one of the most loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, "boring as fuck" and adamantly refuses to play it on Game Grumps, prompting Jon to try and shut him up and anticipating a backlash by saying "hey who wants to see a Game Grumps video with a giant dislike bar?"
  • In Part 15 of the Pokemon FireRed LP, he got some of this for speaking negatively of Gen 3, even though that wasn't his opinion; he had been asked at which Gen people believe the series went downhill and was stating the general opinion toward Gen 3 (at least at the time of release).
  • He's also stated that he finds Devil May Cry and Ōkami awful games. The backlash on these was almost palpable in the videos they were mentioned in.
• Nerd³ generally gets a lot of flak whenever he talks about Role-Playing Games since he rarely seems to be playing them seriously and just mucks about and then goes on to dismiss the game, but the worst case of this happened when he played Dark Souls, even after giving a warning at the beginning that he's not a fan of the genre and wouldn't be playing it seriously.
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: His 2012 review of Eternal Darkness put him in hot water with the game's fanbase, as he ended it saying that he could not recommend the game, which is considered a Cult Classic on the GameCube. However, at the end of the review, he encouraged his fans to explain to him what he's missing if he isn't 'getting' it, and that he'll make a follow-up video at the end of the year to address all these comments. True to his word, said video was made. Unfortunately for fans, all their tips and corrections arguably lessened his opinion of the game, as he now viewed the game as going from needlessly frustrating to ridiculously easy. He did come to see enough appeal in it to now recommend the game as entry-level horror alternative to titles such as Silent Hill 2, however.
• videogamedunkey:
  • Dunkey received quite a bit of flak for his video on Splatoon 2, which many believed didn't even try to give the game a chance. For one example, he criticized how difficult it was to aim in the game — after turning off the game's gyro controls, which are the default control scheme and are widely regarded as being more accurate, and equipping a weapon that explicitly sacrifices accuracy for high spread and rate of fire. He also failed to even mention the existence of several entire game modes, including the game's highly praised PvE mode Salmon Run. Not helping things, this video came out on the heels of his infamous "Game Critics" video, in which he criticized game journalists over some of the same mistakes that he was in turn criticized for making in this video. Unlike his normal, "serious" reviews, however, it was noted that the video did not include "dunkview" in the title, leading some to believe that the whole thing was intended as a Stealth Parody.
  • Dunkey's take on Octopath Traveler was not very well received by a sizable number of viewers, especially among fans of the game and of the genre as a whole. Many accused him of deliberately failing at the game in order to justify giving it a bad score (e.g. not attacking a monster's weakness to break it), and taking elements out of context to misrepresent the game, such as Ophilia's chapter and her repeated use of the phrase "Your Excellency"^ExplanationOphilia is the adopted daughter of Bishop Josef, but due to Japanese attitudes on adoption, is unusually deferential to her adoptive father and usually calls him by his title, unlike how his biological daughter Lianna calls him "Father.". His Reddit post made in response to the negative feedback didn't help either, where he admitted to only playing ten hours of the game, which made his arguments seem hollow, and in general admitted that he was not really paying attention during it.
  • Fans were somewhat split regarding his Kingdom Hearts III dunkview. While many viewers disagreed with him giving the game such a low score (A 1/5, the lowest dunkview score he's given unironically), the overall consensus was that they found his complaints and points about the game's style over substance and Kudzu Plot to be valid, even if they still enjoyed it personally. Indeed, the general consensus was that Dunkey was right that the game's story, characters, and dialogue were not great, especially in the back half of the game, but they disagreed when it came to a lot of the gameplay elements, which were some of the most praised aspects of the game.
  • Many were unimpressed by his extremely negative review of Death Stranding, mainly because they felt he was unfair to the game and deliberately played it wrong. For example, he spent much of the video trying to scale sheer cliffs, something the game expressly warns against, then claimed the controls were bad for not letting him do so. Even some who agreed that the game wasn't great felt that Dunkey went too far. He later revisited the game in a follow-up video where he conceded that, while the game had huge problems and "fucking sucks ass," he'd played it three times and enjoyed it.
  • Dunkey's video on Sonic Frontiers got slammed hard by the Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase. While few will call Frontiers perfect, even those who aren't as keen on the game accused him of portraying it as something it's not and hyperfocusing on its less polished aspects at the expense of its more praised elements. Some noted that he doesn't appear to be taking the game seriously, and that some of the points he brings up contradict each other; in one sequence, he treats static cutscene triggers with laughably low Memory Token requirements as insurmountable obstacles, which is not only blatantly incorrect but goes against his earlier criticism of the game's supposed railroading (the whole point of Memory Tokens is to encourage exploring each area). His footage of the Final Boss also depicts it as an extended Press X to Not Die sequence, giving away that he was playing the entire game on Easy mode. Like his Splatoon 2 video, it's not labeled as a "dunkview", but that they share many of the same flaws seems to discredit the Poe's Law theory, causing some to accuse Dunkey of being either ignorant or intentionally dishonest.
• Any review for a re-released or remade "classic" game that isn't gushing heaps of praise onto the game will garner a significant backlash from fans of said game. Some of the reviewer's complaints may be perfectly valid as what might've been acceptable (or, at least, forgivable) twenty years ago may be inexcusable now. This can also sometimes happen when a long-dormant gaming icon is revived for a new game and said game garners poor or average reviews. Duke Nukem Forever is one of the most notably examples.
• Official Nintendo Magazine (Nintendo Power's British equivalent which lasted an extra two years after Nintendo Power ended) gave Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed for Wii U a 62% review score. The fans of the game who read ONM (as the magazine was known for short) complained about the low scoring (especially since other websites and magazines gave quite high positive scores such as 8 out of 10 in the last issue of Nintendo Power). Two issues later they reviewed the game's online with them aware of the complaints the review and they said how they thought the online was good giving that mode a 4 out of 5 Star Rating.
• Every major U.S. reviewer panned Otomedius Excellent quite harshly, in ways that are commonly taken to reveal none of the reviewers even liked Shoot 'Em Up games and have no business reviewing one. Other reviewers gave the game harsh treatment despite clearly never even playing it. For instance, Destructoid's review of the game uses only the promotional artwork and screenshots to base the entire review on and did it in an extremely offensive way to boot. This extends to the actual fanbase as well.
• Several reviewers who gave low scores to Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy got some flak for some of their complaints, such as outdated gameplay, in a faithful recreation of a 20-year-old series, lack of content (it includes an entire trilogy of games) and difficulty (the originals already were Nintendo Hard, it has nothing to do with the remaster). The best remembered one is the "Crash Bandicoot is the new Dark Souls" fiasco.
• Spyro Reignited Trilogy has Jacksepticeye voicing his opinions on the remake of Year of the Dragon while having his Nostalgia Goggles on, causing many fans to disagree with him and the title being "THEY RUINED EVERYTHING!!!" did not help matters.
• Josh Wise of VideoGamer gave Kingdom Hearts III, a commercially successful game, a 4/10, criticizing it for "Simplistic, repetitive combat", "Tedious, sugary writing" and "Too many leather jackets and zips".
• YouTuber DWTerminator has gotten this reaction many times for panning games that are otherwise highly regarded. For example, his negative reviews of the Marathon series garnered a ton of flaming and downvoting, with him vehemently defending his position in response to negative comments^note to be fair, some of his criticisms ultimately boiled down to It's Hard, So It Sucks!. On the other hand, he's also been praised in some cases for having the guts to criticize a number of other Sacred Cow games like Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn.
• GameSpot gave SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, a remake of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, a game that is considered a Cult Classic by fans of the series, a 2/10. Many fans proceeded to breathe fire onto the review (especially since GameSpot had the bright idea of announcing the review on Twitter), leading to the reviewer, Funké Joseph, being called out for insulting and blocking those who criticized his review.
• Upper Echelon Gamer caught flak for reviewing Doom Eternal and Genshin Impact harshly, to the point of insulting those who defend those two respective titles with legitimate merits (especially how for the former, he seems to be not adjusted with the difficulty and for the latter, there's a very visible bias and clickbait about how it'll "damage the game industry"). His viewership declined, compounded with accusation of him silently shilling AAA game developers.
• Former God of War developer David Jaffe got this when he complained about the level design of Metroid Dread. He viewed what has since been dubbed "The (Jaffe) Room" to be obtuse game design that expects the player to do something they'd never think of doing normally (i.e., shoot the ceiling). People were quick to mock him, pointing out that in addition to "The Room" having multiple tells to goad the player into doing just that, a tutorial had already established "shoot the walls" as a mechanic in the second room of the game. Jaffe snapped back at these critics, claiming that even if that was the case, the player can still get lost because there are too many other areas to explore besides "The Room," only to garner more mockery as he inadvertently demonstrated that the game blocks off every other possible path. Jaffe would make a third and final video on the topic, but people continued to criticize him and claim he's just bad at the game.
  • He would once again catch flack for criticizing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, this time for claiming it had "ugly" graphics. This is in spite of the fact that many agree the game is absolutely stunning even on handheld mode, as its varied environments and set pieces helped make the world feel vibrant and lived-in. He did not help his case at all when he enlisted an A.I. to "fix" the graphics, at a time when A.I. art was becoming more controversial due to its very nature and how it seemingly invalidates and copies the work of actual artists. Naturally, many fans did not appreciate the gesture, and to them this confirmed he was out of touch with modern gaming and what makes for good game design.
• ZeroLenny became infamous among the Dragon's Dogma fans in his community when he released "THE DRAGON'S DOGMA EXPERIENCE", which is basically just a four-minute Author Tract about why the game is slow, boring, and unrewarding, while not progressing very far into the game whatsoever. Even when he would later release a more substantial review of the game where he explains in detail about why the game's not for him personally, the same fans were hoping to see him re-evaluate some of his opinions, which he didn't for the most part.
• Twitch streamer Shenpai has been known to give rather impulsive opinions on media that they dislike. They tend to get the most backlash from Pokémon fans because of their preferential treatment towards the older games while latching onto any flaws of newer titles that are otherwise easy to look past. It didn't help either of their tendency to get into heated arguments on social media. Needless to say, they're not terribly well-liked in the fandom.
• Slant Magazine have over the years caught flack for giving mid-to-low review scores to games that are otherwise hyped and well liked seemingly for the sake of controversy, which has called their legitimacy as a review outlet into question. Among their more controversial takes including giving 6s and 5s to several hyped and well-liked Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Fire Emblem Engage, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and 3, slapping Red Dead Redemption II with a 7, and giving Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (widely considered one of, if not the best game of 2019) a measly 4, and that's just a few of their hot takes that have given them much scorn from fans.
  • In particular, a few of these controversial review scores (namely for Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade 2, and Sekiro) can be traced back to Jed Pressgrove, who has had a habit of giving mid or outright low review scores for games many others like, among which include Bloodborne (though he didn't review it for Slant, he still named it as one of his personal worst games of 2015 and has frequently criticized the Soulsborne games), Sonic Mania, Octopath Traveler, and Final Fantasy X, with many likening him to the aforementioned Armond White in terms of making opposing views for the sake of controversy.

Web Original

• Maddox, author of The Best Page in the Universe, uses the term "ex-biggest fan" to refer to people who enjoyed his works until reading an article panning their personal fandom. His article mocking 9/11 conspiracy theorists was a good example.
• Retsupurae gets this a lot.
  • Examples include LuizPrower, UltraJMan, Protonjon, Cloud8745, Oyster, and DeceasedCrab.
  • SirRonLionheart too. Interestingly, though, Ron's subscriptions skyrocketed after this grilling.
  • ElectricalBeast. EB apparently quite enjoyed his Retsupurae videos.
  • SSoHPKC, where thousands of fans poured in and flamed Retsupurae for riffing him within two hours of the video being put up.
  • Perhaps their biggest example is their riff on an LP of The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare... by The Nostalgia Critic. Although the majority of the hate came from the many insults they made towards NC's fanbase in the videos. Retsupurae would later apologize for some of these comments.
• YouTube commentator, MasterTP10 was subject to a large amount of backlash for his commentary TamashiiHiroka is Worst Pikachu Clone, criticizing Tamashii's countdown, "Top 5 Pikachu Clones"
• Three YouTube commentators, JustCallMeHenry. MasterTP10, and Silver got a great deal of hate for the commentary Tamashii Can't Block These Comments, criticizing Poketubers Trickywii and Tamashii Hiroka's countdown of "Top 10 Disappointing Pokemon"
• YouTube countdown artist, Itionobo 2 (a.k.a The Tree's Apprentice) got a great amount of backlash for his frequent criticism towards another countdown artist, Animal Guy 001 (a.k.a Fawful's Minion).
• Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog frequently features comments saying something along the lines of "I used to love you slagging off homeopathy, but now that you're claiming something I believe in is pseudoscience, you've gone too far."
• LittleKuriboh gets quite a lot of bashing because his web series, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, shamelessly tends to insult Yu-Gi-Oh! GX which some people regard as one of the better Yu-Gi-Oh spinoffs.
• YouTuber Asa gets this quite a bit from fans of Angry Joe. The Angry Army tend to accuse him of being a Troll and other such stuff.
• Game Show Garbage: Cyndi Seidelman inducted "Those Golden Fanbois Who Live Down The Road On The Internet" as a Take That! towards Golden-Road.net's The Price Is Right fan base. This caused backlash not only on Golden-Road.net but on The Game Show Forum and other places in the game show community. Seidelman had to heavily edit her review to remove personal attacks and references to Encyclopedia Dramatica but the damage had already been done. In September 2017, she removed the induction from the site.
• Comedian Jimmy Kimmel got this reaction big time from fans of Let's Players in general after he made a skit making fun of the whole idea of watching Let's Play videos.
• YouTuber GamingAllStarsGmod (SuperSmashBrosGmod in DeviantArt) would remain being ignored if not for the extra exposure from his new fan animations (he's known for his Crossover, Subspace Emissary-esque fanworks). Ever since Super Smash Bros. for Wii U was nearing completion and even after it's already released, his dislike of said game has become very notable to anyone who managed to find his YouTube channel/DeviantArt account. He's apparently known for disliking almost everything announced for the fourth Smash game. His comment in Facebook often reeks of disappointment or hatred of almost every feature/character/stage announcement regardless of how good they are according to the majority of the Smash fanbase, but especially character announcements (Cloud and Corrin come into mind...). In fact, the Broken Base subpage for Super Smash Bros. used to have one entry based on his complaints (like seeing the Wii U version's graphics being watered down compared to Brawl, something that would rub the former game's fans the wrong way...). In short, many SSB4 fans are not amused of his tendency to mock said game and few people even begin to get tired of it or call out the YouTuber for not accepting the game as it is.
• While Psyco the Frog doesn't get this nearly as much as others, (possibly because his target audience is people who agree with his views) he still gets some hate mail for hating most of Nintendo's games and, to a much greater extent, Sonic Colors.
• Maximilian Dood has gotten both this trope and its inverse, with some people complaining that he didn't like their game (or didn't hype it enough for their tastes) while others complain that he's too positive and hypes games that don't deserve it in their opinions. The biggest example is Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, with Max trying to stay positive despite the poor early showing^note He came away from EVO 2017 saying that he had more fun with it than any other game at the show and actually communicating with Capcom developers to offer suggestions on how to improve the game, while many critics have already written it off as a lost cause and moved on to other games (primarily Dragon Ball FighterZ) and expect Max to do the same.
• Bennett the Sage mentions that he still gets hate after his negative reviews of Neon Genesis Evangelion and AKIRA. Rob Paulsen choked him out over his negative review of Evangelion and he received a beatdown from a ton of other personalities including Linkara, his title card artist, and Woolie over Akira and Violence Jack. He even opens up his "Oldtaku, New Tricks" review of My Hero Academia (in which he honestly says it's well-executed, but there's nothing in it that merits the "second coming of Shonen" label that many people give it) by saying that he expects he'll get flak for what he's going to say.
• Internet critic, reviewer and commentator DaftPina has received some flak and hate from fans of Hazbin Hotel after he made a negative review on the pilot.
• Wisecrack is no stranger to this kind of backlash especially with controversial movies such as Suicide Squad (2016). But the biggest backlash yet actually came from an op-ed where they basically went full Fan Hater mode on adult Disney fans (in particular childless people who go to the parks), who they perceive as giant man-children who need to grow up. Naturally many didn't take this well, especially feeling their points were hypocritical since they view Pokémon as better because it's...somehow less childish. As well as ignoring the fact that their "you had your childhood" remark came across as incredibly insensitive to those who grew up in poverty or in broken homes and were unable to go to the parks as kids.
• BuzzFeed got this after they listed Robbie Rotten from LazyTown on a list of annoying kids show characters. Problem is that Robbie Rotten is regarded as a saint on the Internet, especially because of his actor Stefan Karl Steffanson's battle with cancer.
• Hbomberguy got flack for his panning Dark Souls and RWBY. In the "In Defense of Dark Souls II" video, he spends the video attacking the original game instead of offering new perspectives on its controversial sequel. The RWBY video was similarly criticized for him being perceived to be jumping on the "gotta hate RWBY for clicks" bandwagon, further exemplified as he spends the video castigating writers Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, holding the late Monty Oum up on a pedestal and treating Shane Newville's divisive manifesto as gospel. It also doesn't help that not only did his video come off as poorly researched due to missing blatantly obvious details presented in the show, but information was discovered where HBomberGuy openly stated his hatred of Monty Oum when he was still alive, thus his claims of respecting Oum in the video appear to be disingenuous at best, or an outright fabrication that puts the legitimacy of his entire video into question.
• Viclis is well known for being a Caustic Critic of the Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers series, and while it could have been fairly unnoticed for the most part, the fact that he also tends to post it in his gimmick account @NoContextSMG4 meant that fans who were simply watching for scenes taken out of context for comedic effect were in for a rude awakening once they saw his reviews. The most notorious cases was around near the end of the Lawsuit Arc, where he made a scathing review of "Goodbye, SMG4" not long after SMG4's account was hacked in real life, which came as a brutal kicking to SMG4 to them, especially since it also made his announcement of not harassing SMG4 hypocritical, and reaching its breaking point during WOTFI 2022, where he simply announced that he would stop watching SMG4 entirely and only posting clips from "Classic SMG4". While the series always had a problem with old and new audiences, even they found his opinions to be rather scathing even by Old Guard standards, and got called out as a result for turning a gimmick account into a mouthpiece for his biases.
• A YouTuber named The Nerdy Novelist got this reaction from NovelAI fans regarding his comparison review between it and Sudowrite, and for good reason. His panning of the former crosses beyond critique and into outright misinformation, like stating that NovelAI running under OpenAI when it uses its own models and it having trouble with Not Safe for Work also like OpenAI (never mind the fact it provides the most freedom in input/output among all AI services of this type). Add the classic comment removals on ones calling him out for his lack of due dilligence for extra irritation. Not surprising, since he is a Sudowrite affiliate.

Western Animation

• Since South Park's mission is to make fun of literally every group of people in existence, a fairly common opinion you'll see from its detractors is some version of "The show was great until it made fun of my beliefs!" Even the people who actually work on the show aren't immune to this, since Chef's voice actor Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist, quit the show after the episode making fun of Scientology. Trey Parker and Matt Stone were quick to point out that they had poked fun at several other religions and he never seemed to have a problem with it before. Due to his stroke (which he had right before he quit the show), his willingness to poke fun of others before (he had even stated at much), and Scientology's internal policy of dealing with criticism or jokes directed toward it, some believe that it wasn't entirely Hayes's decision to quit the show. The episode following Hayes's departure had Chef become brainwashed by an organization of child molesters masquerading as an Adventurer's Club with an absurd mythology, and ended in his death. At Chef's funeral, Kyle points out that they should not hate Chef for what he did, but rather, the "fruity little club" that made him that way.
• The Agony Booth got this for their review of Heavy Metal.
• The Blockbuster Buster:
  • He took quite the beating for admitting he hates Scooby-Doo while opening for the review of the movie based on the cartoon.
  • E-Rod also got a lot of backlash after panning Robots (not helped by the rather mean-spirited tone he took with the movie's actors' performances) and Hotel Transylvania.
  • When E-Rod gave out his rules at the beginning of his Honest Reviews of the DC Animated Movies of 2014, he said he was not going to talk about The LEGO Batman Movie, calling it "bullshit" and "an overly long advert for kids' toys". Because of this, fans of TT's LEGO Video Games and The LEGO Movie have given him a hard dose of rage.
• A Platypus Comix article about the first issue of Cricket features a very, very mild jab at the Periphery Demographic of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Fans breathed fire at Peter Paltridge, who tried to explain on the ToonZone forums that he wasn't intentionally taking the piss out of bronies, merely comparing himself to one. The fact that an earlier header for the site◊ declared it to be "Pony-free since 2001!" made the flaming continue for a while.
• Familiar Faces:
  • CR has increasingly bashed Friendship Is Magic since its second season finale. His cameo in The Nostalgia Critic review of Son of the Mask where he called the show's third season a "shitty abomination" in a cutaway joke received almost the same amount of attention from viewers as the rest of the video itself. After the initial fan backlash, he has become extremely hostile to anyone who enjoyed the third season overall (often to the point of arguing with and belittling those who attempt to defend it) and is largely unwilling to give out official explanations as to why he does so.^note As the few reasons he has given have come across as incredibly trivial. Such as "Magic Duel" is "pandering" to fans because of the return of fan favorite character Trixie, Luna entering dreams is "gimmicky" and "nonsensical" and Spitfire acting "out-of-character" in a certain episode. As a result, many of his former fans who got into the franchise due to his prior recommendations have lost a great deal of respect for him. And then there's this, based on a screencap image from the original (misinformed) version of the entry.^note The person that CR is blaming is an author over on FIMFiction who has pointed out many of Chad's unreasonable complaints.
  • In a slightly more mild example, CR got a little bit of backlash for not liking the Gravity Falls episode "A Tale of Two Stans."
• Phelous received some backlash for his review of Turtles Forever, particularly from fans of the 2003 series.
• Has happened multiple times during YouTube user Benthelooney's original run. The most notable cases of this were with Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Pixar.
• WatchMojo received massive backlash for putting Gravity Falls on their Top 10 Hated Disney Cartoons list, feeling the show was "too dark" for younger audiences and somewhat formulaic. The backlash was so strong that it led to WatchMojo apologizing for their choice, both in an annotation for the original video and in another video. Not only that, they would later give Gravity Falls the #3 spot on their list of the Top 10 Cartoon Shows of the 2010s, as well as rank Dipper Pines at #6 on the Top 10 Memorable TV Cartoon Characters of the 2010s So Far.
• Voice of Reason has voiced his dislike for Princess Luna on a few occasions, being another one of the bigger names in the same community, he too naturally experienced backlash and as he once voiced his dislike for her on Silver Quill's channel, one commenter even said they would unsubscribe from Silver Quill in spite of him being known to be a big Luna fan to the point where he makes fun of himself for it.
• The Media Man (a DeviantArt-based critic of everything from film to TV to literature) once called SpongeBob SquarePants one of the worst TV shows ever. No, not just Season 6 or any other poorly received season, the entire show. Fans were not happy. The same thing happened when he reviewed The Simpsons (again, the whole show, even positively received episodes, his primary concerns being that every character who wasn't Lisa was a Flat Character, and Bart, normally an Ensemble Dark Horse, coming off not only as The Scrappy to him instead, but as his least favorite character in any media until he began hating Damian Wayne, the current Robin, even more) in which case he closed the comments on the review in preparation of the backlash.
• When animators Jessica "Kalei Works" Sheffield and Hailey "SquigglyDigg" Lain each published an essay in April 2020 about how Lilo & Stitch is "the worst Disney movie ever" because (in Sheffield's essay) it "didn't represent Hawaiian culture" since it was written and directed by two white men—Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois—and (in Lain's essay) for depicting Lilo as a gigantic abusive brat, they received hate mail and death threats from upset fans. The backlash was also severe enough to make the hashtag #Lilo trending on Twitter. The backlash was mainly for the aforementioned interpretation of Lilo as abusive when she's just a child struggling with her trauma, and because both Sheffield and Lain weren't Hawaiian themselves and thus had no more room to state what a good depiction of the state's culture would be. An attempt by Sheffield on Tumblr to rectify the situation using a quote from legendary Native Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku didn't work either, nor did a later apology from Lain added to the end of her essay.
• YouTuber James A. Williams received a lot of flak for his review of the Bob the Builder reboot, mainly from more popular YouTubers (including EmperorLemon) who found it to be ridiculous. Emperor Lemon even went as far with his criticism as to make an April Fools Day video making fun of Jason's videos entitled "The Problem with the Teletubbies REBOOT Explained and Here's Why [RANT]", which led to an awkward boomerang moment when some of Emperor Lemon's fans found the April Fools Day video to be taking his criticism too far.
• Some Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum fans were outraged by the show's Common Sense Media review by one Joyce Slaton who interpreted the show's creative depictions of history as being "historical inaccuracies".
• Animation Magazine received some backlash when Ed, Edd n Eddy first aired, and they featured an article panning the show. They actually ended up retracting it and released a new article in a later issue with a more positive review.
• Seán Ferrick of TrekCulture has been getting some major flak for his criticisms for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4, in particular Beckett Mariner's sub-plot concerning her promotion and her attitude towards it. By the end of the penultimate episode, "The Inner Fight", which reveals that Mariner's attitude stems from the loss of her friend Sito Jaxa — one of the cadets from "The First Duty"'s Nova Squadron who would die on a spy mission in "Lower Decks" in Star Trek: The Next Generation — and the advent of Dominion War increasing her PTSD from losing friends, he's dismissed it as pandering at best and lore-breaking at worst as he seems to believe Mariner is younger than she should be. Many commenters have pointed out that it seems that Seán, and most likely the rest of TrekCulture, want Mariner to have all her problems be a one-and-done thing, which makes the problem a case of Reality Is Unrealistic.
• Alpha Jay of The Alpha Jay Show has had a number of instances where fans don't agree with his negative opinions on episodes, but the video that garnered him the most backlash was "How Romanced RUINED Molly McGee". In it, he claims that the romance between Molly and Ollie that was cemented by "I Wanna Dance With Some-Ollie" ended up altering Molly's characterization for the worse, especially in regards to her friendship with Scratch due to Ollie being a Ghost Hunter. Most fans seemed to think Jay was making the situation out to be more of a big deal than it actually was, especially since Ollie isn't a major character in the grand scheme of things, but what garnered him the most backlash was him comparing Season 2 of The Ghost and Molly McGee to the infamous Season 10 of The Fairly OddParents!, with his viewers seeing the analogy as being way too exaggerated.

Other

• Australian Rules Football:
  • When news broke that Essendon players had been given banned substances in 2012, The Age journalist Caroline Wilson was perhaps the most strident critic of Essendon coach James Hird's role in the affair, something Essendon fans did not appreciate.
  • North Melbourne supporters have been despising her for half a decade longer since the almost-relocation-to-the-Gold-Coast saga and her undisguised disdain of the club and its (at the time) substandard assets. Various unapologetic agendas and a mutual rivalry with the team's President at the time have fueled the hate between the team's supporters.
• YouTuber Taylor "Coaster Studios" Bybee received a large amount of flak for calling La Ronde (a Six Flags park in Montreal) the worst park he's ever been to. It doesn't help that he complained about the French-speaking patrons for supposedly being "rude and obnoxious" and thought that poutine (a beloved Quebecois dish) wasn't a meal.
• An old joke tells of an old woman who regularly attends a church where the pastor regularly condemns various perceived and real social evils and sins. She responds to all of them with a hearty "AAAAMennnn!!" and a generous dip of snuff. Until one day when the pastor starts in on snuff-dipping, whereupon she simply says "Wouldn't you know it? He's stopped preaching and started meddling!"
• In late November 2020 Fox News host Tucker Carlson, known for his tendency to promote fringey right-wing conspiracy theories on his show^note to the point of a moderately successful liberal/progressive boycott of its advertisers, apologized to his audience for the initial credulity with which he greeted allegations by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that the Cuban and Venezuelan governments had secretly funded a massive rigging of the U.S. election through their secret ownership of a company that made widely-used voting machines,^note an allegation easily falsified since she had refused to come on his show and discuss any of the evidence she claimed to have to support this. Viewers immediately took to Twitter to condemn Carlson as a sellout who had betrayed them and the president.

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