Hypocritical Fandom

" "24 is the most ridiculous show in the world! I don't know how anybody can watch it. First of all, the stories are so unrealistic. And they have, like, a hundred plotlines going all at once. And half the time, the good guys are just as crooked as the villains. I can't deal with it, that's why I stick to a show where you can follow the story, that's realistic, and the bad guys and good guys are clear cut. Y'know, like Lost." "

"Note: You could switch the shows around and the above statement would still make no sense."

A loyal fanbase is the motherlode of any writer or producer of fiction. But it has side effects. One of them is the tendency of a given fandom to bash another. But this is more than just Fandom Rivalry.

Fans of a given work have a unique ability to recognize all the failings of a rival franchise, and yet completely miss that their favorite franchise is guilty of many of the same shortcomings. This also works the other way around: Sometimes fans will hold up a work as a masterpiece, and miss the fact that many of their favorite franchise's qualities are present in other works.

This becomes all the more ridiculous when you'd think both franchises would appeal to the same audience. Of all types of fans, maybe this type has the most similarities with supporters of teams in professional sports (Football, Baseball, Soccer, etc): They enjoy the same thing, but have to take a side.

Quite often fans will accept the flaws with their own franchise, but will dismiss them as too minor to count, not important, or even as totally separate (for example non-canon). At the same time they will make a big thing out of equally minor and unimportant flaws in rival franchises, or even parts that are equally non-canon. A classic example is "well, you can't expect a series that long to not have one or two bad episodes", vs constantly referring to the bad episodes or parts of them when attacking rivals. Bad effects, goofs etc are not important in your own favorite, but give endless ammunition for attacking the rivals. This applies to sports too, where that humiliating defeat your own team suffers is ignored or excused (bad luck, bad ref etc), whilst anything that even comes close in terms of a rival team will be the ultimate proof of just how much they suck.

This also is not limited to Fandom, Hatedoms can be just as hypocritical (In fact, much of this kind of hypocrisy tends to come from a show's hatedom). You have those people who hate on stuff because they don't want to be seen as some mindless bandwagoneer, whilst ignoring that they're jumping on the bandwagon of hating it.

A subtrope of Fandom Rivalry and Hypocrite. Vocal Minority is where most of this comes from. Not So Different is often invoked. If the fandom is called out on the hypocrisy, the No True Scotsman fallacy can sometimes be invoked to deny that their favorite works have what they are criticizing.

Tropes which rely on, or include this fallacy

 * Acceptable Targets
 * Unacceptable Targets
 * Cultural Posturing
 * Misplaced Nationalism
 * Console Wars
 * PC vs. Console
 * Computer Wars
 * Double Standard
 * Even Nerds Have Standards
 * Fandom Heresy
 * Fan Dumb
 * Hate Dumb
 * It's Popular, Now It Sucks
 * True Art
 * Sacred Cow
 * Nostalgia Filter
 * Public Medium Ignorance
 * Selective Obliviousness
 * Unpleasable Fanbase
 * The Tropeless Tale
 * Cliché Storm
 * Troperiffic