History Main / ReviewsAreTheGospel

* Even Website/ThisVeryWiki gets in on the action. While references to reviewers have been a staple since the beginning, an abundance of pages (mainly YMMV pages) made references to ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', Roger Ebert and ''WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic'' (amongst others) ''constantly'' (with some examples simply quoting their favorite reviewer and calling it a day) before the website started cracking down on what has come to be known as "needless reviewer references".

This mentality often hurts some works when people believe a reviewer's word to be law. Oftentimes, reviewers will become rather jaded and tend to be a tad cold towards works that they don't particularly ''love'' years down the road. Not to mention, some reviewers often have a BiasSteamroller, which can also cause them to take points off of a work merely because they have certain pet peeves, or add points because they like the franchise. In some of the more worse cases, this leads to people [[PraisingShowsYouDontWatch Praising Shows They Don't Watch]] or [[ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontWatch Complaining About Shows They Don't Watch]]. An even worse case than that is when someone starts an argument with another because the latter likes or dislikes something that a reviewer has given a different judgment to, and the former does not have an opinion of their own but is making judgments based on what the reviewer said.

This mentality often hurts some works when people believe a reviewer's word to be law. Oftentimes, reviewers will become rather jaded and tend to be a tad cold towards works that they don't particularly ''love'' years down the road. Not to mention, some reviewers often have a BiasSteamroller, which can also cause them to take points off of a work merely because they have certain pet peeves, or add points because they like the franchise. In some of the more worse cases, this leads to people [[PraisingShowsYouDontWatch Praising Shows They Don't Watch]] or [[ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontWatch Complaining About Shows They Don't Watch]]. An even worse case than that is when someone starts an argument with another because the latter likes or dislikes something that a reviewer has given a negative judgment to, and the former does not have an opinion of their own but is making judgments based on what the reviewer said.

Culturally speaking, this deference has existed for awhile, as aftershocks from UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983. One of the big problems of first and second generation video games was the general absence of any detailed information about games. This leads to many upset consumers who had to guess whether a game was any good and quickly became frustrated to discover they just put a lot of cash down for a PortingDisaster or imitation of an arcade game they thought they liked. This is the reason for the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" -- which wasn't supposed to mean "awesome game" so much as "playable game" and "Nintendo has licensed this game to be sold" (the first and second generations also had games that were not licensed by Creator/{{Atari}}, which was part of the problem as they never had to go through quality control -- quality here meaning "playable"). Unfortunately, many seem to see reviews as the only means to obtain their information, even though far more objective outlets exist, many of which can not be bought like professional reviewers can.

** This is despite the fact that Creator/DougWalker has gone on record that most of the time he doesn't ''actually'' hate the movies but he does AccentuateTheNegative for comedic effect. Most of the time they're just mediocre to decent movies, albeit with genuine flaws (although what movies ''doesn't'' have them?). A lot of the flaming comes from his fans missing the point.

* Of all of the Website/ThatGuyWithTheGlasses community, no one suffers most from this than WebVideo/TheCinemaSnob. Yes, many movies he reviews really are bad. But keep in mind that he is also a parody of TrueArt critics. As such, he will pan the occasional average movie for the sake of comedy. People will take him seriously. While it is typically easy to tell when he actually does hate a movie and he isn't acting, sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. For reference, he once praised the movie ''Film/{{Film/Salo|OrThe120DaysOfSodom}}''. For the sake of decency, we will not summarize it further, but suffice to say that the movie was 50% artsy pretentiousness (something that TrueArt critics like) and 150% concentrated evil. People thought he actually liked it, even as his praises were interspersed between scenes of him either throwing up on camera, or trying desperately not to (and ultimately failing). Brad Jones even said he struggled to write positive things about the movie.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that, whilst a review ''could'' give good insights into a game's technical competence, it can't answer the crucial question of whether said game is right for you personally. Tempting though it might be to snag the latest [=AAA=] game getting 9's and 10's across the board, there are also many important personal considerations to take into account. Would the game's 60+ hour length eventually turn you off to it (i.e. cut into other commitments - including other games that you might be playing or want to play)? Does the game sound like it would offer little that other games in your collection don't already offer? Do you personally dislike the genre/franchise or just feel burned out by it? All are important questions that cannot be answered by somebody else's review for a game.

** A similar phenomenon hit ''VideoGame/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles'' (the NES adaptation, not the arcade title with a similar name). Prior to the AVGN's review, the reception was all over the place. After he reviewed the game, the game's reputation took a nosedive, with newer reviews pointing out the game's flaws that his original video. Now, the game's reception is mostly mixed, with complaints about its difficulty and how the game was an InNameOnly adaptation.

* Inverted by Music/{{Metallica}}'s ''St. Anger'' album, which got positive reviews and won multiple awards... despite being reviled by nearly every fan of the band (or even genre), and eventually even by the band itself.

* ''Film/BohemianRhapsody'' pokes fun at this: the movie shows Music/{{Queen}}'s first release of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the air overlaid with pop-up quotes from reviewers as one might see in an ad, except the reviews are all horrible. Of course, the audience knows that the song went on to become a huge hit and one of the band's {{Signature Song}}s.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Ratatouille}}'', a world famous chef's reputation and life were destroyed by a harsh critic who had a personal grudge stemming from a differing opinion.

* The infamous ''Crappy Games Wiki'' often had a tendency to invoke this in readers of the website due to them usually listing [[AccentuateTheNegative every negative aspect]] before any positive ones rather than writing a full fledged article. Ironically pages on certain games would pop up on the site not long after reviews of them would be uploaded online, but what drives this further is that the pages usually list Youtube videos of these games getting harshly criticized as references.

* The infamous ''Crappy Games Wiki'' often had a tendency to invoke this in readers of the website due to them usually listing [[AccentuateTheNegative every negative aspect]] before any positive ones rather than writing a full fledged article. Ironically pages on certain games would pop up on the site not long after reviews of them would be uploaded online, but what drives this further is that the pages usually list Youtube videos of these games getting harshly critisized as references.