YMMV / Rihanna

• Award Snub: Many people believed this happened to her album "Anti" for the 2017 Grammy awards, due to it having many nominations and not winning anything.
• Broken Base: The "We Found Love" music video. Artful, accurate, beautiful and daring representation of her turbulent relationship with Chris Brown or disgusting glorification of drug abuse? Both?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Judging by critical reaction and sales, Rihanna herself seems to be one whenever she appears on Drake's songs and vice versa.
• Fandom Rivalry: Her hardcore fans do NOT like Sia since Sia is vastly considered by many to be a better singer than Rihanna, the fact that Sia's biggest hit "Cheap Thrills" was originally written for Rihanna and was turned down, and that Rihanna's biggest hit "Diamonds" is co-written by Sia.
• Fan Nickname: Her fans call her Riri^note which has the misfortune of also being shorthand for a word that means developmentally disabled, Rihallah and Godinna.
• Genre Turning Point: Her cosmetic line Fenty Beauty's inclusive range of beauty product that accommodate a wide array of non-European skin tones has led to the brand's wide success, which in turn has caused other beauty brands to cater to the previously-ignored darker skin color women community.
• Growing the Beard: Good Girl Gone Bad is considered to be a vast improvement, has higher sales than her previous album and established her signature style.
• Jerkass Woobie: The woman in "Bitch Better Have My Money."
• Les Yay:
  • The music video for Te Amo has Rihanna being seduced by French actress/model Laetitia Casta.
  • The music video for Can't Remember to Forget You with Shakira, it's very hard to remember they are talking about a guy and not each other. The making-of documentary more so, where the two singers go on about how sexy they find one another and, at one point, RiRi squeezes Shakira's butt.
• Nightmare Fuel: The music video for "Disturbia".
  • The entire music video for "Bitch Better Have My Money".
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: "We Found Love" music video's controversy of being denied filming due to the owner of the location displeased with Rihanna appearing topless only helped increase its viewership in the UK.
• Questionable Casting: In multiple films, the critical community have wondered what the hell Rihanna's doing in the movie, and then she shut them up with some of the best acting in the film. You'd think that the critics would know better by now.
• Refrain from Assuming: "S&M" is not "Come On" or "I Like It".
• She Really Can Act: Her acting roles in Battleship (though this one took some heat as well), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Ocean's 8 were widely praised, even by those who didn't like the films.
• Signature Song: "Umbrella", with "We Found Love" a distant second and by album:
  • Music of the Sun — "Pon de Replay", though she despises it.
  • A Girl Like Me — "SOS" and "Unfaithful"
  • Good Girl Gone Bad — "Umbrella" and "Don't Stop the Music"
    • Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded — "Disturbia"
  • Rated R — "Russian Roulette" and "Rude Boy"
  • Loud — "Only Girl (In the World)" and "S&M"
  • Talk That Talk — "We Found Love" and "Where Have You Been?"
  • Unapologetic — "Diamonds" and "Stay"
  • Anti — "Work"
• Spiritual Successor:
  • It has been implied that Talk That Talk is the second half of Rated R. Even though the albums are technically and creatively unrelated, they both are edgy, deep and extremely personal.
  • The music video to "Where Have You Been" can be seen as a successor to the music video to "Disturbia".
• Tear Jerker: "Unfaithful", a song about a woman who is cheating on her lover...and her lover absolutely knows it. Does he fly into a vengeful rage? No. He just quietly watches as she continues the facade and remains unfaithful. The singer sees all of this and hates every moment of it, lamenting that she can see how much pain she's putting him through and how she just wants it all to end.
  I don't wanna do this anymore
  I don't wanna be the reason why
  Everytime I walk out the door
  I see him die a little more inside
  I don't wanna hurt him anymore
  I don't wanna take away his life
  I don't wanna be...
  A murderer...
  • "Lift Me Up", the theme from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is an heart-wrenchingly beautiful tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the song "Unfaithful", the listeners are supposed to sympathize with the lady cheating on the man because she feels guilty of it. Instead, she came off as unsympathetic for not only cheating on the guy in the first place, but also not immediately stopping even after she got caught. Also, if the genders were reversed, nobody would be sympathetic at all.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Contrary to popular belief, she pronounces her name as "Ree-AN-na" not "Ree-AH-na".
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The song "Shut Up And Drive" appeared in Wreck-It Ralph, but if you read the lyrics and see the music video, you'll quickly learn it's...not about racing. The fact a song like this made it through to a kid's movie in the first place is astonishing.
• The Woobie: The man described in "Unfaithful."

---