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"Hey! Let me tell you something. I just got this show/movie/book, and it's awesome! You'll totally love it! It's got action and adventure and comedy and romance and it's really mature without ever losing its sense of fun. It's like it was made for you! I can't believe you haven't seen it yet! ...hey, where are you going?"
"Maybe it's because my heart is a dried up little rotten apple of cynicism, but when a game gets overhyped it's more likely to make me suspicious than excited. — Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation, ( also an example of this trope in question) describing Bio Shock.
Recommendations are strange things. If one person thinks you'd like something, you'll probably rush and check it out. Even if they're wrong, it can't be that bad, right?
Why is it that when twenty people say you'd like something, you'll just keep putting it off more and more?
This, my friends, is Hype Aversion: the specific avoidance of a work mainly because of how much you're told you'll like it.
There's a number of reasons for why this happens: Maybe it's a genre you're not so keen on. Maybe you're afraid that it's popular because it appeals to the Lowest Common Denominator. Maybe you're afraid that you won't enjoy it, and will have to deal with the fact that people you thought you knew don't really share your tastes. Maybe it's how, as more people and the Hollywood Hype Machine recommend something, the probability of meeting someone disconcertingly obsessed with it approaches one. Maybe the fandom in general has a certain level of squick to it that makes you a little uncomfortable. Maybe it's become a strange sort of anti-establishment pride that you refuse to check out something so many have liked. Bonus points if they express shock at how you've not seen it and peer-pressure you so much that you feel your independent thinking is getting seriously threatened. Maybe you're afraid that you'll like it too much, thus losing interest in what you previously enjoyed more. Maybe you feel you're not worthy. Maybe you're just that stubborn. It could also be because of this little thing called Reverse Psychology...
In any case, you might realize that yep, it's as great as everyone says... or at least not so bad that you'd be offended that people thought you would like it. On the other hand, you might end up a little let down — given all the hype, shouldn't Final Fantasy VII really be able to cure cancer, impotence or chronic bedwetting, give a determined, suicidal-averting reason to go on living, and guarantee one an automatic gate pass for Heaven?
Anything billed as the next incarnation of a popular work will get this.
Can lead to Complaining About Shows You Dont Watch if the aversion goes far enough.
Contrast Hype Backlash, where the hype doesn't prevent you from watching, but taints your reaction when you do. See Bile Fascination for the exact opposite of this trope. Related to the Hollywood Hype Machine, which starts the ball rolling for more mainstream successful ones.
Please note that this page is not meant to be a personal blog for things you are avoiding because you think it's overrated. If you would like to do that then there is a Troper Tales page for you to do that; this page discusses the general tendency for certain properties to suffer Hype Aversion, whereas that page is where you can talk about personal experiences of this trope.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Anime as a medium experienced this in the late 90s, as the fandom exploded. This was especially prevalent after the success of Pokemon, which turned many people away from the "smarter, more adult series, even as that same success made it easier for those series to be imported, and the Hype Aversion still continues to this day. Also, the same "smarter, more adult series" get Hype Aversion for their own reasons.
- Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu absolutely exploded after only two or three episodes had been aired. It is physically impossible for any show on the planet to be as amazingly brilliant as the initial hype insisted Suzumiya Haruhi was.
- Possibly as a result of this, any Kyoto Animation production is soon subject to Hype Aversion, even if it has nothing to do with Haruhi. Lucky Star suffered especially, as it shares many aspects of Haruhi — the Dancing Theme, the high-quality animation, Aya Hirano as the main character and a ton of Haruhi Shout Outs — yet has a completely different tone, subject and art style, which also put off the Haruhi fans that expected more of the same.
- Death Note, another top anime of 2006. This was partly caused by all the fanboys who postulated its superiority over Code Geass, the third top show of '06, with similarly intellectual approach to plot.
- Which brings us Code Geass, a once-in-a-lifetime show, or Death Note with mechas.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion suffered from this both upon its initial popularity and with the wave of spinoff media that accompanied its tenth anniversary.
- Axis Powers Hetalia, bane of 4chan's /cm/ and Livejournal multifandom games.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which, according to some fans, would seem to be a divinely inspired life-changing experience.
- Naruto suffers from this, possibly due to being placed into the Animation Age Ghetto. Many people subconsciously associate the Cartoon Network preteen fanbase screaming "BELIEVE IT" and making misspelled posts with screen names like "Sakura39869395392" and actively refuse to watch the show.
- In fact, a similar phenomenon occurs with many other Anime that's been broadcast on television. If a fanbase for a particular series becomes annoying (for example, if it is overrun with young fans, enjoys arguing amongst itself, or has some other annoying habit), the less likely a person will want to actually check out the series.
Card Games
Comic Books
Computer Programs
- TeX/LaTeX, a typesetting system used by scientists and other real men.
- That isn't so much hype aversion as TeX/LaTeX being so incredibly poorly documented and arcane that learning how to use them is not usually worth the effort for anything other than typesetting mathematical equations.
- Innumerable programmers forgo learning languages like Java or C#, which would be entirely appropriate for their particular use, because they have been hyped as being easy to use. This is helped by the fact that, especially in the corporate world, programs are made "easy" for new and inexperienced users... and absolutely impossible for people at a level above that.
- On the different end of spectrum, things like Python, Haskell, Scala, all different variants of Lisp and ML, etc are often avoided just because they promise to solve some problems of more mainstream languages. Which, as we all know, is impossible and besides their fans are annoying.
- Ruby isn't there yet (thanks to it actually being pretty damn easy AND powerful,) but it's getting there.
- Ruby, a Perlish language, it's damn easy, and Python, lots cleaner, it's not? Fighting words!
- Ruby is definitely there, especially with those fucking rails.
- In the operating system world, we have both Macintosh and Linux, which have cultivated fan communities that stand on opposite ends of the tech-savvyness scale, but are just as devoted/obnoxious/pushy as each other. Their respective communities tend to treat them as a panacea that can cure every computer ill one might have, as well as making it seem as if one must drink gallons of kool-aid in order to fully appreciate them.
- The Mozilla Firefox web browser. Considering the aggressive nature of its ad campaigns ("You're still not watching VHS... so why use an outdated browser?") and its overzealous, Hive Mind-like Fan Dumb preaching that it is better than whatever browser you're using, most people are unable to judge it as an Internet browser.
- Some sites would often force you or constantly annoy you to get Firefox, opening on a naggy "ARE YOU INSANE?! GET FIREFOX!" message every time you visit, or just downright blocking or barely functioning for any other browser that isn't Firefox until you get said browser. There are even some sites which use "It works with Firefox!" as an excuse for their instability and incompatibility with other browsers.
- This was pre-dated by the "Best Viewed With" campaigns for Netscape, Firefox's predecessor, and Internet Explorer which tore up the internet in the 90s.
- XKCD on the subject.
- Eclipse, which is supposed to solve all programming problems and support every possible language, compiler, external tool, etc. When it does not, you can always stop whatever you were working on and write your own plugin to do so. Emacs is similar in some respects but has also mysterious key bindings, Lisp everywhere and a lot less shininess than more modern tools.
Fandom
Film
- The Departed, after it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards — especially if the recipient of the recommendation had already seen Infernal Affairs.
- The Dark Knight, which is quite possibly the most egregious example of both this and Hype Backlash. It didn't help that one of the actors died before the release (automatically making the movie one thousand percent better), the critics and internet fanboys orgasmically praising the movie when it came, or that the film made quite a few memes.
- The films of Pixar are slowly, but surely getting there, with each one having to contend with the notion that it will be the one that shows the company has jumped the shark.
- Star Wars — especially after the new trilogy suffered from massive Hype Backlash.
- The Godfather trilogy.
- Fight Club - the greatest 'manly' movie ever according to most magazines. So 50% of us should automatically love it. This may also apply to The Usual Suspects and anything directed by Christopher Nolan.
- "We've made a movie about how great your generation are and how they don't take crap from anybody! Now like it."
- ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! I'M TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT THIS MOTHERFUCKING MOVIE ABOUT MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES ON A MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!!!!
- Taken Most advertised movie of 2009. Major case of trailers always spoil
- The Princess Bride
- Titanic, especially after it continued its run in theaters for about a year. Dave Letterman offhandedly remarked around this time that he still hadn't seen the film.
- The English Patient, a rare example of Hype Aversion going fully mainstream, as it was immortalized in an episode of Seinfeld.
- Oscar Bait movies in general often suffer from this, as many of them don't reach wide theatrical releases until after they've received a clutch of nominations and/or wins.
- Slumdog Millionaire.
- Any film by Quentin Tarantino. And likely a different one depending on who you ask.
- Any classic film. Especially Citizen Kane.
- 300. It didn't help that the movie was pretty much a GOLD MINE for Memetic Mutation.
- The Graduate is frequently held up as a paragon of film making and a defining film of a generation. Interestingly enough, a lot of baby boomers who come back to watch the movie in their 40s and 50s sympathize more with Mrs. Robinson than sad sack Benjamin Braddock, who many think should have just stopped moping and gotten into plastic. In fact, Rumor Has It seems to have been more or less based on this, and it was arguably the one good thing the movie had going for it.
- Any film that was adapted from a book of any form. Especially Watchmen, or any Stephen King book, or Lord Of The Rings, or Harry Potter, or....
- Monty Python.
- Avatar - well it's not even out, and it already has sweet army of haters, who will gladly telly you just how non-photorealistic, and uncool this movie is.
Literature
- Harry Potter
- The Mass Culture Critique, a high-art manifesto published in the mid-20th century, declared that if something was popular, it couldn't be any good.
- His Dark Materials
- The Discworld series.
- Twilight. Apparently it's gotten so bad people have been attacked for not liking the series.
- Twilight is probably the only series to have a Hatedom that negatively hypes the series so much that it creates anti-Hype Backlash causing more people to read it out of spite for the hatedom adding more ranks to the Fan Dumb which propagates normal hype backlash and hatedom which...ad infinitum.
- In nonfiction, books like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense Of Food tend to get pushed very, very hard in certain circles.
- Lord Of The Rings.
- V For Vendetta
- Wheel Of Time, even when some of it is hatred of the more recent books...
- Everything and anything written by Stephen King.
- Any high-brow "intellectual" literature.
- Mark Twain defined a classic as a book that everybody knew about, but no one had ever read.
Live Action TV
- Arrested Development
- Any production by Mutant Enemy: Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse...
- Pushing Daisies
- Lost is a great example because, of course, the show is impossible to follow if you miss so much as 30 seconds. Generally speaking, the shorter something is, the less excuse you have for escaping it.
- Spoofed in an episode of The Soup, in which a Joel McHale states that not only is the viewer missing out by not watching Lost, but that now, its too late. He then proceeds to display a fast-forward clip of various aspects, plot twists, characters, Mind Screws, and ends with the suggestion to watch something "more your speed, like Freddie."
- Blame Continuity Lockout for this.
- Whatever the current "sooooo much better than Star Trek" sci-fi show is. Past examples include Babylon Five, Andromeda, Farscape, and Firefly; the current officeholder is Battlestar Galactica. These shows tend to be (a) genuinely great, (b) nowhere near as all-consumingly brilliant as their fandoms think, and (c) constant victims of Screwed By The Network.
- The list would not be complete without some mention of The Sopranos, which all critics are required to praise above all other products of human creativity in existence. A bumper film on Saturday Night Live was made up of increasingly hyperbolic Soprano reviews, climaxing with an orgasmic cry of "Sopranos!"
- The Wire.
- Mad Men. From the critical ravings about it you'd think it not only is the finest achievement in all human history and a possible cure for cancer, but anyone who may even think about not liking a show which, from what little can be gleaned from actual reports of what it contains before you watch it, is about some asshole ad executives in the 60's for any reason, is implied to be simply incapable of recognizing quality and a complete moron to boot. Maybe it would be best to not bother watching to avoid disappointment because of the hype is one line of thinking. And god help you if you see it and don't like it.
- Doctor Who. Especially in the UK, where it's one of those 'National Institution' shows. Peter Davison raised an interesting point on a 40th anniversary documentary that people born from 1978-1988 didn't have their own 'Doctor' (TV movie excepted), so they might not be as endeared to the show as others older and younger are.
- Monty Python.
- Friday Night Lights, as spoofed by David Spade: "Why is it every critic loves Friday Night Lights, and you're still not watching? We don't get it. What are you, a moron? Don't tell me you're watching American Idol. I hate to tell you, but you sound like an idiot when you talk about that show. It's for two-year-olds. Who do we have to blow to get you to watch Friday Night Lights? Watch it already. Fuck you."
- Glee.
- Heroes.
- Have we mentioned Monty Python?
Music
- "Stairway to Heaven" is probably the biggest musical example of this. But "Smoke on the Water" and "Freebird" are both getting there.
- Led Zeppelin is perhaps the archetypal case of this in music, at least for this editor. Of course, well-meaning religious fanatic friends convincing me that it was evil Satan music helped.
- The Beatles. Yeah, they revolutionized pop music, but for some people they're just too popular to be good. It's not understood how decades of people adoring them, hundreds of bands wanting to be The Next One of Them, imitations, homages, and covers could come about if "They're just a bunch of hyped up, pre-N*Sync pretty boys who didn't do anything different from what all the other druggy hippies did back then."
- The Jonas Brothers. It doesn't help that there are legions of fangirls who worship the Jonas Brothers and despise everyone who doesn't. And, in the same vein, Hannah Montana.
- And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, MCR fans. Who usually tend to hate Miley Cyrus/Jonas Brothers with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.
- Tom Waits.
- Anything in the NME, the world's most hyperbolic music magazine, that has a tendency to gather up clusters of hot new indie bands and build them up so much that you know their music can't possibly be that good.
- Especially true during December/January, when the music press really goes OTT on 'The Bands You MUST See This Year!'.
- Animal Collective, Wavves, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, The Gaslight Anthem, Los Campesinos!, Jay Reatard, Fleet Foxes and various other bands that Pitchfork Media heaps breathless praise on (these bands tend to be genuinely good, though).
- Eminem, who certainly has skill (and thankfully grew out of his homophobe phase), but many listeners feel he wouldn't be nearly as successful if he wasn't white, which taints the perception of non-listeners.
Theatre
Video Games
- Pick an MMO. Any MMO.
- Grim Fandango
- Final Fantasy gets this a lot, especially when its combined with the Unpleasable Fanbase and Hype Backlash.
- So does any game billed to be the next Final Fantasy. (See Xenosaga.)
- The Super Smash Bros series.
- Team Fortress 2
- Halo
- Halo 3's marketing campaign was especially ridiculous, as every product had a Halo endorsement.
- Grand Theft Auto IV
- Portal, due to Its Popular Now It Sucks, Memetic Mutation, the Companion Cube, the Still Alive song, highly positive reviews across the board, Zero Punctuation actually praising it, being a Valve game... really, the list could go on and on.
- Super Mario Galaxy had such an ungodly amount of hype and praise when it was first released that you were simply not allowed to deem as it anything less than TEN OUT OF TEN GAME OF THE YEAR.
- And now it's getting a sequel. Who knows if it's gonna get the same amount of hype when it's released.
- Mass Effect.
- Persona 3 or any Persona or Megaten game, for the matter.
- Any game that has any controversy attached to it or wasn't released for any particular reason in any specific realm. Persona 2: Innocent Sin is a particularly prominent example.
- Guitar Hero and Rock Band, particularly for Bemani elitists.
- Just because you like listening to AC/DC or QoTSA, doesn't mean you want to play them on a computer game (or even on a real guitar for that matter)
- The World Ends With You has quickly turned into a mixture of this and Hype Backlash, especially at Game FA Qs. Expect recommendation topics to be swarmed with fans that may likely bring up the point that this is a new game that needs all possible support. Some fans might go into holier than thou mode if anyone makes any kind of mention relating to disappointment with the game, which results in some Fan Haters coming in and fanning the Flame War.
- This troper honestly hates Dr. Wily's theme from Mega Man 2, mainly because everyone talks about how it's the best song from any Mega Man game and how Mega Man 2 has the best music, despite Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 6 having MUCH better music.
- Games on Facebook. Partly justified in that you can only see so many stories about them on your news feed before you get tired of them. Though to be fair, you can always hide news stories from specific Facebook apps, and forget they even exist.
Web Original
- The Image Board 4chan pretty much lives off this, particularly the Video Games (/v/) and Anime (/a/) boards. A good game/anime will become very popular with 4channers, it'll get discussed a lot, and people become more and more sick of it, at which point trolls strike, talking about how horrible it is. This negative opinion influences the Anonymous contributors, until eventually it becomes genuine. Final Fantasy VII suffered to the point where even posting Tifa Rule Thirty Four gets you ridiculed.
- On that note, 4chan's own reputation precedes it, somewhat in thanks to a Fox news report that likened them with terrorists. *Footage of a van exploding*
- On the more quiet Comics & Cartoons (/co/) board it usually goes through the following stages (Or So I Heard):
1. Omg, "Show X"'s release is announced! "Show X" is win.
2. Omg, "Show X"'s trailer was released today! "Show X" is fail.
3. Omg, "Show X" will be finally released today! I can't wait!
4. (pause)
5. "Show X" was win / "Show X" was fail. Debates.
6. Let's post tens of topics related to "Show X".
7. We're sick of tens of topics related to "Show X".
8. If I see a "Show X" topic one more time!..
9. (pause)
10. Hey, what's "Show X"? Is it any good? :)
- TV Tropes. You gotta admit that somewhere out there, some people are getting tired of seeing links leading to this site in forums, webcomics, and various sites about the media, thinking that all of these sites are part of some campaign to assimilate everyone to a HiveMind-controlled state of Troperdom.
- The Giant In The Playground forums, in particular, have pretty much had it up to here with links to this site.
- Lots of people are. The default response to a TV Tropes links is "well, there goes the rest of my day"...
- The gaming forum Neo GAF tends to provoke this with regards to anything that's perceived as not having done as well as it should have commercially or with anything from producers of the preceding. It's the only place where you're likely to come away feeling that a commercial flop that received mixed reviews might be a little overrated.
- Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
Western Animation
Other
- Everything iPod.
- In fact, portable media players in general.
- In fact, Apple products in general.
- The iPhone. Getting to number 1 on Time's Top 100 Inventions list over more practical and beneficial inventions does that to products.
- Tabletop game fans seem particularly prone to this, from Dungeons And Dragons to Warhammer. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Warhammer: Age of Conflict, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War have all been met by backlashes from the established communities.
- And don't get us started on Traveller.
- Partially justified as the time, money, and expense to find people to play with and even get started on a Pn P RPG is quite high. New players usually don't have that kind of resources and existing players usually have spent large amounts of all that they would like to see their purchases and energy justified as 'right'.
- Live theatre example — at the bigger Fringe Festivals in Canada, any production by T.J. Dawe gets a lot of this.
- Any political candidate can strike you with this, should you run into a too fervent supporter. The king of this online would be Ron Paul.
- Alfa Romeo. The greatest cars in the world apparently. As they said on Top Gear, "you can't be a petrolhead unless you've owned one". Okaaaay.
- Religions. We shall limit the discussion to the observation that there are not-insignificant portions of the population who find themselves turned off from various philosophical conceits, due to the nature of the personalities who speak on its behalf.
- Twitter, and most other social networking sites in the My Space tradition. Some people speak as if they'd rather die than sign up for such a thing, even though it's free and can be a convenient way to keep up with the latest news about your favorite bands/web sites/people. It's not like you actually have to do anything...
- See what you just did there? That's called "hype," and it's the reason that we avoid your social networking sites, even if they are free.
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