"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?"
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 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 recommend something, the probability of meeting someone
disconcertingly obsessed with it approaches 1. 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.
In any case, nine times out of ten, when you finally check it out, you 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reason to go on living, and guarantee one an automatic gate pass for Heaven, instead of being a generic, outdated RPG with an incomprehensible ending?
That having been said, check out
Firefly already, jeez.
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.
Anything billed as the next incarnation of a popular work will get this. The leading cause of
Hype Aversion is, of course,
this website.
Examples:
- Arrested Development
- Avatar The Last Airbender. The fact that it happens to be broadcast by Nickelodeon isn't a big help either.
- Grim Fandango
- Harry Potter
- Any production by Mutant Enemy.
- 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."
- The Departed, after it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Especially if the recipient of the recommendation has already seen Infernal Affairs.
- 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 Image Board 4chan pretty much lives off this, articularly 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.
- List would not be complete without some mention of The Sopranos, which all critics are basically required to praise above all other shows/movies/etc 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 Mass Culture Critique, a high-art manifesto published in the mid-20th century, basically declared that if something was popular, it couldn't be any good.
- The films of Pixar are slowly, but surely getting there, with each one having to combat the notion that it will be the one that shows the company has jumped the shark. Reading the reviews of Ratatouille, you can almost hear the critics' cries of "SERIOUSLY! YOU'VE LIKED THE OTHER ONES! WHY DO YOU THINK YOU WON'T LIKE THIS ONE!"
- Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu; 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 Haruhi was.. But come on guys, I hate anime, and I love Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu! ...guys?
- 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.
- 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.
- Star Wars -- especially after the new trilogy suffered from Hype Backlash.
- "Stairway to Heaven" is probably the biggest musical example of this.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion is starting to suffer from this, these days. (This troper avoided the show for two years because of all the hype.)
- The Godfather films.
- The Exorcist.
- 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 Wire, aka The Greatest Television Show Ever (tm).
- Anime as a medium experienced this in the late 90s, as the fandom exploded.
- Scientific example: This editor, a computer scientist, postponed learning TeX
/LaTeX (a typesetting system used by scientists and other real men) for a year and half due to excessive hype. This editor has since repented and is now a huge fan of TeX.
- In the same vein as the prior example, 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.
- The Elemental Heroes from Yu-Gi-Oh, while a perfectly serviceable card archetype, are experiencing this due to Konami's insistence on shoehorning them into every single set, apparently due to the popularity of the character who plays them in the series. More people would probably play them if they didn't crowd out every other strategy.
