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Main Quotes main index Narrative
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"What is food to one man may be a fierce poison to others."
Many shows have broad appeal, and most people who see them generally have a positive or neutral opinion on their value. Others appeal to a niche market and get positive views from their target audiences, while mainstream viewers are merely indifferent. Others are awful, but a lucky few of those manage to gain fans who like them because they're so bad.
Some, however, manage to achieve the result of intensely polarizing viewership, with the result that nobody thinks the show is average or "worth watching, if there's nothing else on". Half of the viewers laud the series as the greatest, most intelligent, engaging thing ever to grace the small screen, and the other half condemning it as a horrible, worthless load of festering bollocks that clutters the airwaves with reeking lines of awfulness.
Similarly, with Video Games and albums, reviews take the form of either "This is the best game/album ever - buy it now!" and "This game/album should never have been made. Avoid."
Sequels or remakes to existing properties that significantly change the source material are particularly prone to this kind of reception. People tend to either love the work as a reinvention/evolution of the source material, or despise it for changing too much and/or losing the spirit of the beloved original.
When this happens within a fandom, it's known as Broken Base. Serious Business tends to aggravate the problem. Expect various forms of Take a Third Option, though this usually ends up being just a third point of extremes.
See also Hype Aversion, Hype Backlash, Confirmation Bias and Contested Sequel. Applied to food and drink (and fierce poison), this is usually Foreign Queasine. May form a Hatedom. Compare Base Breaker, which is basically this trope when applied to characters.
Contrast So Okay, It's Average.
Please only add examples that are presented in-story. In Real Life, this applies to literally everything. No matter how universal the affection for something may seem, there is someone, somewhere who doesn't care for it (and vice versa). The only way to cover all the possible examples would be to write "Everything ever, to some extent", so Real Life examples aren't wanted.
— Lucretius
Examples: open/close all folders
Advertising
Literature
Live Action TV
Music
Stand-Up Comedy
Tabletop Games
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
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