Unknown Rival / Real Life

• In March 2009, New York, N.Y. Radio station WXRK changed from a rock format to Top-40. They then immediately positioned themselves as the The Rival to established Top-40 station Z-100. Since then they've been bashing Z-100 constantly in commercials, including a shameless ripoff of Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC." ads, and a spot accusing them of supporting hip-hop artist and domestic violence accusee Chris Brown. If Z-100 noticed, they never showed it.
• This happened briefly in Seattle too in the mid-2000s. A new alternative station popped up with a lineup of DJs that was almost exclusively formerly with the alternative station that had existed in Seattle for around a decade and a half at that point, and their ads and listener testimonials repeatedly made a point of noting how the more popular alternative station sucks now. The more popular station never, ever acknowledged their existence and the upstart alternative station was gone within a year.
• Enver Hoxha of Albania was pretty much this to both the communist and the capitalist world in the Cold War, having cut ties with Tito's Yugoslavia for being anti-Stalin, the Soviet Eastern Bloc for destalinizing, and later with China for its detente with America. Albania would go on to build numerous bunkers around the country out of fear of an invasion that never came. Needless to say, none of the aforementioned states care much about invading Socialist Albania.
• Exploited by Warner Bros. with its cartoons that lampoon Disney. The studio was an easy target for two reasons: firstly because everyone was familiar with Disney, and secondly because Warner Bros. knew that Disney didn't really care enough about the "rivalry" to make fun of them back.
• British comedian Jack Whitehall describes himself as this to Twilight's Robert Pattinson; he claims to have had a one-sided rivalry with Pattinson since high school. This is one of the few examples where the unknown is well aware that the object of his rivalry doesn't notice or care.
• In the First-Person Shooter genre of video games, the developers of the Battlefield games view themselves as rivals against Call of Duty and want to take their throne as King of FPS games away from them. This has created a chasm between Battlefield fans and Call of Duty fans where the former claim that their games are a more unique FPS and CoD is generic and doesn't deserve all the sales and popularity it has as a franchise. Call of Duty's response? Its developers were quite surprised to hear that developers and fans of the Battlefield games even care all that much about it and doesn't see why the two franchises can't learn from each other and make the industry as a whole stronger. To non-fans, the two series are often seen as interchangeable.
• Console Wars:
  • NEC once tried to pick a fight with Sega via their Johnny Turbo comics, solely because Sega was the only other console manufacturer at the time who had a CD-ROM accessory out for their console. They even went as far as disputing Sega's claim that the Sega Genesis was the first 16-bit console in the market and claiming that the TurboGrafx-16 was first (which isn't technically correct, as the main CPU of the TG16 was an 8-bit 6502 derivative). Sega, which was famous at the time for its aggressive digs at the competition, never gave a single response to NEC.^note Then again, with the TG-16 only having something like 10% of the market share (and even that's a generous estimate) to begin with, why would they bother?
  • During the fifth generation of consoles, multiple ads for the Sega Saturn in North America bashed the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, nicknaming them "Plaything" and "Pretendo" and proudly boasting about the Saturn's large library and additional processors. This was likely an attempt to duplicate the success of Sega's original marketing campaign with the Genesis. Sony and Nintendo's ads never mentioned the Saturn, in large part because neither company saw it as even remotely a threat anymore (as evidenced by Sony's presentation of the PlayStation immediately after the Saturn's at 1995's E3, where the president of SECA simply walked up to the mic, said "$299" - a hundred bucks cheaper than the Saturn was - and walked off), the Nintendo 64 outsold it tenfold in North America, and the PS1 sold double that.
• PC gamers towards console gamers, with the former touting the myriad of ways consoles are vastly inferior to PC thanks to their superior graphics and performance. An issue of the magazine PC Gamer even once had an article on building a perfect gaming rig for under $600, which concluded with the line "Take that, consoles!" This rivalry has historically been a fairly one-sided sentiment however, as console gamers are generally too busy taking shots at each other to bother acknowledging anyone claiming to be part of the "PC Master Race" with anything more than vague annoyance at best and complete indifference at worse.
• North Korea had been constantly threatening the United States and South Korea with nuclear war since early 2013. Judging by the comments on news stories about these threats, most Americans were unaware of why North Korea was suddenly so angry at them and were not at all intimidated. In general, the entire justification for their military government is the "inevitable" American invasion, when America has barely thought about them since active fighting ended in 1953 and, short of North Korea actually crossing the DMZ, has no reason to do so. This specific case appears to have been something the NK leadership made up so that after the posturing they can claim the Americans backed down. More recently, the DPRK's improving nuclear tech has increased the fear of their threats having the possibility of actually being followed through with among average Americans, and American politicians are competing with each other over who has the best solution in dealing with the North.
• In the late 19th century, the thought of annexation by the US was a huge issue to Canadians.
  • Politicians won elections campaigning against it, political cartoons were circulated in Canadian newspapers depicting Canada or Britannia kicking Uncle Sam to the curb, etc. Meanwhile, most Americans weren't focused on Canada, caring much more about the Civil War, the conflicts with the Native Americans, and military interventions in Central America. There were only two times that the United States actually made any attempt toward annexing Canada: once during the War of 1812, and once before the US technically existed. After that, US expansion was uniformly aimed westward (with a bit eastward), not northward.
  • The leading Canadian politicians of the era kept the state of affairs firmly in this trope. Their goal was to make sure that the United States did not start looking north as a direction for expansion. The Northwest Mounted Police were established primarily to make sure that Canada could justify its claims over the areas that would become Alberta and Saskatchewan and a transcontinental railroad was built to solidify this claim. However, Canada never tried to claim any territory to the south which was claimed by the United States. This resulted in any Americans who tried to look north to quickly decide that it would be too much of a headache when they could go west instead.
  • This still shows up in the way the War of 1812 is covered in history books in the respective countries. From the Canadian perspective, this was the conflict in which Canadian farmers beat back Yankee invaders and burned down the White House in revenge (rather inaccurately, since the forces that raided Washington were British regulars with hardly a Canadian among them), while very few people in the United States know much about this war. Those that do saw the British as their primary enemy in the war, and the casus belli as British impressment of American sailors. The British don't even remember ever fighting it; it was a sideshow for their series of wars with Napoleon.
• When Hugo Chávez was alive, he fancied himself and the "Revolution" he led in Venezuela as the biggest enemy of the USA, deprecating the "Empire", rejecting American humanitarian help, antagonizing every American functionary he could and insulting whoever was the States' President at the time. Suffice to say, the feeling wasn't mutual (the King of Spain reacted to his antics more than any American President did). The thing was perfectly summed up in a political cartoon◊ which depicts Chavez as a gas station employee insulting car driver George W. Bush while the latter says "Yes, yes, whatever you say... fill up the tank, buddy!" His successor as President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has continued the pattern.
• Several political analysts see the traditional anti-American feeling prevalent in South America as a form of this trope. While not denying the controversial policies applied in the region, and the justified hate several citizens of certain countries have against USA, the truth is that more often than not the countries that obsess the most against the USA tend to be the ones who have had the least direct American intervention during their history. Most Americans don't even know about it.
• When it was discovered that "One Direction Day" and the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary were on the same day (November 23, 2013), some of the band's fans were quite upset, going so far as to demand that Doctor Who change the date of the Anniversary Special and claim that One Direction had somehow "picked the day first." Doctor Who fans just either laughed at them (if they were being generous), or asked who One Direction was.
• Since they weren't invited to the treaties that ended World War I, Andorra was technically at war with Germany for 25 years without Germany noticing. Better yet, America was invited but didn't sign, meaning technically, America was still at war with Germany until they later signed a separate peace agreement. Similarly, Teddy Roosevelt forgot to invite representatives from Montenegro to the peace conference to end the Russo-Japanese War that he was hosting at Portsmouth because he did not realize that Montenegro declared war against Japan in a show of solidarity with Russia.
• Sarah Palin was this to Barack Obama when he was the US President. Despite actually calling for his impeachment (which often tries the patience of members of her own party) he rarely even acknowledged a thing she said, brushing off the few questions interviewers asked him about her.
• Carly Fiorina was this to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 Presidential run, spending the majority of her short-lived campaign attacking Clinton relentlessly and trying to position herself as the anti-Hillary; at various points speculating about her marriage, accusing Hillary of imitating HER, and repeating the same attack line ('Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe ... but unlike Mrs. Hillary Clinton, I know that flying is an activity, not an accomplishment') over and over again during her speeches. For all this, the only time Hillary Clinton ever even referenced Carly was to defend her and attack Donald Trump after he reportedly made fun of Fiorina's face in 2015, indicating she probably hadn't perceived her as much of a threat to begin with.
• There's John Boehner's attempt to sue Obama. Needless to say Obama didn't seem to have even noticed this, let alone actually care (he certainly never felt the need to comment).
• In the U.S., members of the Green Party really, really hate the Democratic Party, despite, or possibly because of, the Greens being very similar ideologically to the left wing of the Democrats. The Democrats almost never mention the Greens, but many of them did blame Ralph Nader and Jill Stein for their presidential losses in 2000 and 2016. This is probably connected to the party leadership refusing to acknowledge that its own left wing exists unless it's to blame Bernie Sanders or the rest of the progressive movement for something, usually election losses or failures of important votes in Congress.
• Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It's common for Baltimoreans to have chips on their shoulders about DC. In DC, by contrast, some people show how PC they are by saying nice things about Baltimore, while most people need to be reminded that Baltimore even exists.
• George Orwell was this to Josef Stalin. The whole reason why Eric Arthur Blair used the pseudonym George Orwell was because he was deadly afraid that Stalin would try and assassinate him, and his two most famous works were based on his views on Stalin and his regime. As far as we know, Stalin didn't even know Orwell existed and was far more preoccupied with the Germans and later the Allies to care about some political author from England.
• Harry Markopolis was this to Bernie Madoff. Detailed in the book "No One Would Listen", Markopolis worked for years to bring Madoff's Ponzi scheme to light, telling the SEC, the news, and everyone who would listen to him (though the title shows the effectiveness). Over time, he became worried about reprisal from Madoff, as other stockbrokers had been attacked over thousands, and this was concerning billions, more than enough to kill over. In the end, Madoff's sons confessed when the money in the Ponzi scheme was running out, and Madoff didn't even know Markopolis's name until after he was arrested.
• Both Malaysian and Indonesian governments abide by a policy of not recognizing Israel, instead favoring the legal recognition of Palestine at Israel's expense (as opposed to a two-state solution where both would be recognized), largely due to the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the majority Muslim populations of both countries. Consequently, Israeli products and media are banned in both of them. Israel on their part, however, doesn't exactly return the favor, and both Malaysian and Indonesian stuff can be freely consumed in the country. Hell, Israeli government even listed three Indonesians as the recipients of Righteous Among the Nations honorary title.
• When the American Athletic Conference was formed in Collegiate American Football, the University of Connecticut (UConn) tried to form a rivalry with the University of Central Florida (UCF) they termed the "Civil ConFLiCT". They even made a trophy for it. UCF—both the athletic program, and its fanbase—disavows the existence of the rivalry. This "rivalry" pretty much died, even from UConn's perspective, after UConn left The American in 2020 to rejoin most of its historic basketball rivals in the Big East Conference, parking its football team as an FBS independent.^note For the record, UCF is 6-2 against UConn in college football.
• Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson seems to have had this kind of rivalry with President Richard Nixon. Thompson hated Nixon, devoted a fair amount of ink to denouncing him, and genuinely considered himself Nixon's Arch-Enemy. There's no evidence Nixon even knew who Thompson was; notably, Thompson was not on Nixon's infamous Enemies List, something he was reportedly furious about.