Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch

"Because guess what? You might not know everything about a genre you refuse to listen to."

—sisabet, Hate the Song, Like the Vid?

An all too common phenomenon among people who bash things: they don't actually look at what they're bashing. These are the people who insult movies before they even come out, or claim a video game Rated "M" for Money has more deplorable content than is actually there (see the page quote).

Note, this doesn't mean you have to sit through an entire movie/play an entire game/watch every episode/listen to every song on the album/read every single page to criticize any pieces of work. It just means you make sure your criticism is valid. Popcultural Osmosis is far from authoritative, and it usually leads to blatantly false information.

If you want to comment on the quality of something, try to actually watch/read/play/listen to at least a substantial part of that work.

Or what if there is a genuine Wall Banger? You may not even need to look at a work to know a Wall Banger is bad. Most of us know the shower scene in Dallas was a damn stupid thing. Some of us know that M. Night Shyamalan casting himself as the indirect savior of mankind in Lady in the Water is a blatant case of Mary Sue. Yet even then, make sure the Wall Banger actually happened. There is no rape option in any of the Grand Theft Auto games. The closest thing is one of the Villains doing that in one of the games. Not the player character.

Also, sometimes this can be invoked if some leave out the full context of complaints to make a show they don't like look bad.

Some people have pointed fingers at reviewers and gaming magazines for doing this with games that aren't "Politically important" (which here means, "Are published by big-name companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, EA, Activision, Square-Enix, Valve, and therefore bring a lot of money in via Advertisements"), which tend to get less detailed reviews than some other games. Rather, it's more of a bias since some of these less politically important games get less time devoted to them, but there have been some cases in which it seems like they didn't play that much.

The inverse can happen as well. Someone could complain about a part of a show, and it may actually be worse than the person thinks. It's very rare, but it happens.

Also note that if a person decides they hate something before even watching it their opinion may be less than dependable.

See also Moral Guardians, who do this a lot. Additionally, lack of research may lead someone, even unintentionally, to commit an act of Hypocritical Fandom. Frequently springs from Did Not Do the Research. When people actually do watch the show, you get Don't Like, Don't Read.

The opposite is Praising Shows You Don't Watch.