So Bad It's Horrible Cleanup

@Septimus Heap: At the very least, a caption can be put below the image saying "Disclaimer: Your Mileage May Vary on whether the special is this trope or So Bad, It's Good."

So, should I delete the entry for Highlander II?

This should all really go in the individual discussion pages of each of the subpages; contrary to what you might expect, they are fairly active.

Really, concerted external effort is not necessary here. There are discussion pages for this. Use them.

I think this thread is a good idea. You can get banned for defending some examples on the discusion. I only defended Jack And Jill (the film by Adam Sandler) because a lot of the jokes worked and Al Pacino provided lots of Ham and Cheese (Most his scenes were hilarious). Also Someone listed the full version of Titanic The Legend Goes On and that movie has plenty of fans. Anyway we should clean up the more ambigulous examples.

Uh... again: This trope is not about whether or not you, personally, find something enjoyably awful; it is about whether critical consensus regards it as irredeemably awful. This also does not mean that individual parts of a work cannot be entertaining, only that the whole is generally regarded to fall below the criteria of "so bad that it's good again."

P.S. The reason why fighting over certain entries in certain discussions is verboten is because they have already been talked to death and/or edit-warred over endlessly with the ultimate conclusion being to keep them. This is not the place to revive old site site drama.

edited 5th Apr '13 1:31:00 AM by JHM

What JHM said. While The Legend Goes On and Jack and Jill do have fans, most people hated them, so they belong on the list. This trope applies toward things in which the general conscientious is that they're absolutely bad.

Also, just a question: Would Alpha and Omega belong on one of the SBIH pages? It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, all of the critics hated it, and the only defenders of the movie I've found are DeviantArt users.

Examples for this page need to lack any genuine fandom as the trope page clearly says.

So no, none of the examples in @31 would fit without proof of the previous criterium.

If a work that is considered SBIH can be saved by ten people saying they and their friends like it, then SBIH is a failure and needs to die. The requirements of 'cannot have a fandom' asks us to prove a negative. By this logic, nothing can be SBIH.

edited 5th Apr '13 12:48:25 PM by EditorPallMall

Pretty much, although one could make the argument for a lack of an organised group of fans who laud the work for reasons other than disgusted amusement as a kind of informal criterion. Formally, however, the issue is one of universal critical loathing and an insufficient number of redeeming elements.

Well, see. That leads to a big question, which is how many people does it take to make a Fandom?

Again: Strictly speaking, it doesn't matter.

Uh, no. So Bad, It's Horrible says explicitly "These works don't attract proper fandoms".

Hmm. True. But is that a qualifier or a symptom?

For the record, I would not say that Alpha And Omega is a good candidate for the page. There is a fine line between "universally critically panned" and "universally critically despised."

Yes, we've always defined SBIH as "something that is so bad that 99% of the people who watch it are turned off by it - even it's own fanbase". It's not enough to just say, "Well, 10 people liked it - that means it must be good!" If an overwhelming amount of evidence - critical consensus, box-office gross, Nielsen figures, Youtube votes, et al. show an overwhelming dislike of the work, it would likely count under SBIH.

I run into this a lot in the Advertising subpage - people seem to confuse Love It or Hate It or SBIG for this trope. That said, the page has worked very well, largely because (almost) all of the examples have to conform to a very specific set of standards.

I posted this in the discussion page for Horrible.Western Animation, but there was no response.

Wait, the Star Wars Holiday Special was on this page, but was removed? That's commonly used as the definition of So Bad Its Horrible, and the page image specifically uses it as its sole example. That's going to cause some misuse, at the very least.

So in order to be exist on this page, a work needs to be a critical failure, and have a more or less completely nonexistent fanbase? That seems way too picky to me, since anything that's famous enough is bound to have a sizable number of people who like it (ironically or not), no matter how bad it is, like the Holiday Special. If it wasn't connected to Star Wars, no one would even know about it in order to like it. I totally agree with post 33.

I mean, obviously, something that is bad enough will often stay unpopular and never have the numbers for a fanbase, but things like, again, the Holiday Special, who get a reputation specifically for this, are bound to have people gather around it.

I feel like the definition as it is being enforced should be renamed something like Critically Panned or No Fanbase. So Bad Its Horrible is by its definition subjective, of course some people are going to disagree. On the YMMV page for the Holiday Special, they list So Bad, It's Good, but I personally feel it's So Bad Its Horrible, how come one can subjectively be put on the page and the other can't?

Also, it seems a bit unfair to tell people to discuss this on the discussion pages, and then say you can get in trouble for talking about contentious topics, when a newcomer being redirected to the discussion page may have no idea what was contentious in the past?

edited 9th Jul '13 11:53:09 AM by Jokubas

So Bad, It's Horrible has strict and partially objective criteria as it got huge misuse before.

I'd like to challenge Godzilla: Strike Zone's place here. While the gameplay is kinda dull, it hardly awful. I have some reviews like this one, this one, this one, and this one.

The Bill & Ted example here violates rule #2 (that offensive works aren't inherently horrible).

You can remove to the discussion page, then.

Coming to think about it, these pages are usually handled on the discussion tabs. Not sure why we do need this thread, then.

From the way the Bill & Ted show was savaged in the review and got shut down quickly due to backlash, I think it might still qualify.

Already took this discussion, but just in case nobody see's it:

Someone has added a line on the individual So Bad Its Horrible pages, stating that individual comics arcs, books, etc., in otherwise good series shouldn't be added. While, it could make sense to leave those to Wallbangers, like we already do with TV shows, I'm not sure if it's the same thing, at least with comic book arcs and book sequels. Otherwise we'd have to do the same with bad movie sequels and such as well.

If there's some consensus regarding this, a lot of those pages will need to be cleaned up and, in some cases, changes to the description will need to be made.

"otherwise good" is even more subjective than the issue the trope addresses.

That said, however, at the moment I can't see why there shouldn't be a prohibition against citing individual issues of a multi-issue work, but I haven't looked at SBIH in ages, so I don't know what kind of shenanigans have taken place.

I do know of the shenanigans involving one person unilaterally declaring a change to how the page is handled, however, thanks to your post. If that added line is still there, remove it until the issue is discussed and resolved (here or another thread, dunno).

edited 21st Aug '15 7:26:25 AM by Nohbody

I'm not gonna lie, the Horrible.Anime page is pretty weak. There's several noted examples, such as BlazBlue: Alter Memory, Amnesia, and Diabolik Lovers that, while definitely despised by a huge chunk of people, still seem decently successful with their target audiences, while Tsukihime mostly just looks like bashing it for being a poor adaptation, not to mention I do know a couple people who don't mind the anime (or at least, just think it's meh). Even Master of Martial Hearts sold well for Funimation (though I don't know whether or not it's because there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, so you be the judge).

If they're at all successful with their target audience, they're not SBIH. SBIH requires that the work fail even with the target audience, not that the work gets a mixed reception with them.

[edit] That said, I'm not familiar with those specific examples, so I couldn't comment on their being listed.

edited 28th Sep '15 12:06:47 AM by Nohbody