Misused: He Panned It Now He Sucks

Note: This thread was proposed by Number 9 Robotic.

As the wiki is becoming more aware about complaining and gratuitous negativity, the more that the purpose of He Panned It, Now He Sucks! confuses me. According to the trope page's description, this should be a trope (or YMMV article, whatever exactly it's called haha) that primarily applies to reviewers and whatever platform they work off of, but more often than not, He Panned It, Now He Sucks! is used on pages of works themselves to highlight some random, unrelated reviewer's negative opinion of the work, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why that'd be something worth documenting, since it always comes down to "this person gave a meh score and fans got annoyed."

Wick check here. Semi-important note: good fraction of the wicks are used specifically for the bodies of trope pages as simple definitions (such as all the Dethroning Moment pages; it only exists to say "Please no He Panned It, Now He Sucks!). Will be disqualifying those examples for this check, but make of that what you will. My current findings:

• (1/50, 2%) Used in a reviewer's YMMV page more or less correctly for its intended purpose (and even then, it's a borderline case due to lacking elaborate context).
• (9/50, 18%) Used in a reviewer's YMMV page but have their own significant problems (misuse, ZCE, etc.) .
• (21/50, 42%) Used in a work's YMMV page to complain about someone's opinion.
• (8/50, 16%) Term used as definition (invoking, discussion, in-universe examples).
• (3/50, 6%) Other ZCEs.
• (8/50, 16%) Other forms of misuse

In general, there doesn't appear to be a real feasible middle ground between either over-explaining why the reviewer's opinion is disliked (treading very much into Complaining About People Not Liking the Show, occasionally with extensive rebuttals arguing against the person's criticisms), or simply not enough to even explain that something was "panned" to begin with. There's also a common trend of entries that openly admit that the person in question didn't pan the work but was merely lukewarm about it, which seems especially petty (wasn't Eight Point Eight disambiguated in part because of that?). Another pattern is people inverting the trope and documenting examples where critics like or praise something and that receives flack, despite YMMV "tropes" not allowing such modification.

One last thing that I didn't include in part of the wick checks are the dedicated He Panned It, Now He Sucks! pages for specific reviewers, such as Jimquisition, The Mysterious Mr. Enter, and The Nostalgia Critic. Most of the entires of these pages come off as having the same ramblingly negative tones you'd find in a Darth Wiki Horrible article than something that belongs in a typical YMMV article, and they all also suffer the aforementioned problems of either over-explaining the negativity, overstating the negativity, or providing no real reasoning for why a critic disliked a work but still feeling the need to document "fans hate him because of it."

What should be the fate of He Panned It, Now He Sucks!? Is it inherently too negative to really keep as is? Does it need a narrowing down of definition? Cleanup so it goes only on the pages of reviewers and not works? Let's discuss.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2024 at 9:00:38 AM

Paging ~Number 9 Robotic to the thread.

If there are enough "inversions," we could create a new YMMV page called He Praised It Now He Sucks. As for the presence of this trope on works' YMMV pages, are we sure that it's misuse? For every other It Sucks trope, "It" is also a work, and you can put examples on "Its" YMMV page.

Edited by FSharp on Apr 17th 2024 at 1:20:27 PM

Since YMMV can't be played with, splitting off examples involving praise instead of criticism might work.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:44:16 PM

Hi, so I actually queued this post as being a subject of "Complaining", which is what I feel is the bigger issue here. The problem is that compared to other It Sucks posts, this isn't a trope whose intent is to be directed to an actual work, but instead specifically towards real-world individuals — ostensibly reviewers in specific, but it appears just any random people online who others have a bone to pick with are fair game.

Most of these examples in the wick check I found to be are just "this person has a negative opinion and people aren't okay with that", and I'm wondering how that isn't just unironic Complaining About People Not Liking the Show (which is under No Real Life Examples, Please!). The other kinds of misuse are definitely a thing, but the whole mission statement about this trope is very much in question and I think that's the more pertinent problem that needs to be addressed first.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 17th 2024 at 10:58:55 AM

Now that you mention it, this might count as troping people instead of works, especially since Complaining About People Not Liking the Show is IUEO and NRLEP.

Edit: Now that I think of it, this might be being used to get around Complaining About People Not Liking the Show's IUEO and NRLEP status.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2024 at 1:01:34 PM

It explicitly is troping real people: "He Panned It, now 'He Sucks".

Since this has a five-digit inbound count, we can't cut it completely, so maybe we could disambiguate it between Complaining About People Not Liking the Show and It Sucks (and maybe other pages).

Edit: I think I'm in favor of that now, since it's been pointed out that this is troping people instead of works.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2024 at 1:03:34 PM

Well, it's troping the audience reaction to a real person. Which I guess isn't any better.

If troping real people is bad, does that mean that all the tropes on the Creators page should be cut?

Those are supposed to be troping their works, not the person.

Plus, there have been times when commented-out notes have had to be added to pages to get people to keep it that way.

The issue with disambiguating is that the only two options this can possibly go towards are an IUEO/NRLEP trope and a generic index. So far, all uses of the trope I've found are about documenting why people dislike the opinion of someone IRL, so that immediately disqualifies both options — there just isn't any way we can really justify keeping this as a tropeworthy vector and not expect it to not be inherently inflammatory and controversial.

If inbounds are a concern, probably the only course of action that makes sense to me would be to just make it part of Definition-Only Pages.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:37:32 AM

Making it definition-only sounds fine, now that you mention it. I didn't think of that; I was mainly focused on preserving the high inbound count. I'm in favor of making it definition-only now.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2024 at 1:36:52 PM

I always feel weird about doing that to things that aren't fanspeak or other industry terms, mostly because this doesn't seem to be the sort of concept people need a definition for. It's just "fans getting mad when critic says bad thing about thing they like"

If this page was just "He Panned It," with no mention of any reactions to this panning, would it be a valid trope, Trivia, or YMMV? And, could it further be reframed into something like "It Was Panned By Him" to allow it on work pages or work subpages?

Edited by FSharp on Apr 17th 2024 at 2:42:40 PM

Yeah, but considering we have a bunch of various Mary Sue subtropes that basically can't be used anywhere due to also being extremely inflammatory, it seems like either we just have to accept it as part of the wiki for antiquity's sake but adjust it as constructively as we can, or bite the bullet and remove it entirely (or just pretend like it isn't a problem, but yknow lol). I'd vote to just make it definition-only.

(ninja'd)

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:44:27 AM

That's just "critic dislikes work". It'll just end up as a list of Caustic Critics, especially for infamous works.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 17th 2024 at 2:43:27 PM

Well, if we end up disambiguating, we could add Caustic Critic to the disambiguation page.

People getting mad at critics giving a bad review to something they love is a given, so maybe the backlash has to be big enough on some level (like most of Armond White's reviews) to count? Though maybe that's making it too subjective, since it'll only feel "big" to a specific niche of people online. Doesn't help that time marches on and this kind of backlash tends to be forgotten: Does anyone remember what negative opinion Todd in the Shadows had about Wreck-It Ralph almost 12 years ago? I wouldn't remember it at all outside of the entry mentioning it on his YMMV page.

Do pages that have too many inbounds to cut ever end up getting locked for archival purposes?

"This work has a poorly written review", to me a bigger issue is that this is not really noteworthy as YMMV, rather than complaining.

To add to disambig: Accentuate the Negative and Bile Fascination, Critical Backlash, Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer, and maybe other tropes.

Unless we rework into some "the work is associated with one particularly infamous review" like IGN's "too much water", but I'm unsure how it'd work.

TBH I'm wondering if this would just be best punted to Darth. I could go for a disambig I guess but as mentioned the examples don't really have places to go.

Darth or Flame Bait sound like alternatives to disambiguation.

Why not both?

Anyways, I agree on making it Darth if we're not disambiguating.

Edited by Berrenta on Apr 18th 2024 at 8:28:06 AM