Praising Shows You Don't Watch: Difference between revisions

 

Compare [[Popcultural Osmosis]].

 

== [[Anime]]/Manga ==

 

== [[Film]] ==

** ''[[Citizen Kane (Film)|Citizen Kane]]''

** ''[[Lawrence of Arabia]]''

** ''[[Taxi Driver]]'' and ''[[Raging Bull]]''

** ''[[Gone With the Wind]]'', ''[[Ben Hur]]'', ''[[The Ten Commandments]]''- basically [[Epic Movie|anything long enough to have an intermission built in]].

* ''[[The Wizard of Oz]]'' partially averts this. Almost everyone has seen it, but most people only watch it when they're kids or when they're ''with'' kids, and so can go many years without being exposed to it. It's common to watch it again after a long absence and being surprised by a sight gag, quip, or sequence that one had totally forgotten about.

** Or to [[Late to The Punchline|suddenly get a joke]] that [[Parental Bonus|went over your head years ago]].

* ''[[Moby-Dick]]''

* ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'' gets this, too. Mostly for people who haven't exactly read it, but praise it more for what they accomplished.

** That's debatable, as most people can only repeat the concept of Big Brother and think of it as an extreme form of totalitarianism that sees everything and controls everything. Anyone who has actually read 1984 knows that the vast majority of the population (the proles) doesn't need to be closely watched and it's only the Party itself that must be controlled. The repression in 1984 then is less caused by strong governmental control as most people imply when they try to make analogies about 1984, and instead it's an internalized repression that people enter almost willingly. The big concept in 1984 is not Big Brother; it's toughtcrime.

* Mark Twain would be displeased to learn that ''[[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]]'' now meets his definition of "classic." When most people discuss the book, they refer to one scene -- Tom tricking his friends into whitewashing a fence for him. This occurs in Chapter 2. Either that is an incredibly awesome scene, or it's got 'most quoted' status in school textbooks, or most people stop reading around page twenty. You can tell that someone has actually read the whole thing when they refer to other memorable scenes, like getting lost in the caves, and Tom and Huck attending their own funeral.

* Many works of mythology, such as [[The Epic of Gilgamesh]], [[King Arthur]] and various other texts of [[Classical Mythology]] and other myths. Although many are well-respected as inspirations for modern fantasy and great storylines by themselves, few people have probably actually read them.

* Part of the [[Framing Device]] for why ''[[The Princess Bride (Literature)|The Princess Bride]]'' (the book, not the movie) is an 'abridged version' is because the author (who is, in the [[Framing Device]], claiming to merely be an editor) recommended this book highly to his son, despite the fact he'd never read it, having only heard the (much shorter) version his father read to him as a child.

* ''A Brief History of Time}'' and ''Godel Escher and Bach'' are both well-known for this, the former having been described as "the most unread book ever written". These tend to be the sort of books that people leave on their bookshelves or coffee tables to look sophisticated, but because the books are quite challenging to read, only a handful of people who own them have ever finished them.

 

* ''[[Radiant Silvergun]]'' is praised outside of Japan for various reasons related to gameplay and story, but [[No Export for You|the fact it was never released internationally and that it costs a small fortune]] makes it skeptical that many of them have ever seen anything more than a few videos of it.

* The ''[[Virtua Fighter]]'' series a whole. Often praised as the deepest fighting game ever created...by most that never played it.

** Rather hilariously true of many Amazon.com game reviews since 2000 onward, with people giving five star reviews to games that won't come out for months, sometimes reviewing the game based on a couple of screenshots and rambling about features that don't exist (but clearly should and will in five months!). Amazon's gotten better about it, at least.

* ''[[ICO (Video Game)|ICO]]'' is widely praised as being a simple yet artistic, touching game. Finding people who actually played it, though, is not quite easy.

* ''[[Portal (Video Game)|Portal]]'' has become insanely popular, but it is hard to tell whether people actually like the game itself or [[Watch It for The Meme|just listen to the memes the game created without even knowing a thing about the Companion Cube or how]] [[The Cake Is a Lie]].

* ''[[Terraria]]'' had a community like this pre-release, with many people praising the game well before it came out and claiming it to be nothing like ''[[Minecraft]]'', despite only a limited number of them having played it at that point.

* A good number of ''[[Touhou Project]]'' fans [[Periphery Demographic|have not played the games proper]], and are only familiar with the games through fanart, doujins, remixes and other fan material.