"Sure, here's a link to TV Tropes."
Razputin: If you hate the show so much, why don't you just leave?
Jasper: I just can't take my eyes off it! It's like watching the scene of a horrible car accident. A car accident where the victims can't act, and the paramedics forget their lines!
Jasper: I just can't take my eyes off it! It's like watching the scene of a horrible car accident. A car accident where the victims can't act, and the paramedics forget their lines!
There's Hype Aversion, when numerous people's rabid touting of the latest masterpiece deter you from rushing out and buying it. And then there's the reverse phenomenon, when numerous people's rabid panning of the latest uber-stinker, complete with detailed lists on why you should never, ever, ever buy this piece of dung actually fill you with the masochistic urge to rush out and buy it just to see if it's that bad.
It's like hearing about the train wreck of the century: Your better sensibilities are repulsed at the thought of it, and yet part of you wants to see that wreck in all its magnificent destruction. You want to see just how gloriously terrible it must be for all the high-profile people to be expressing their horror over it.
Don't feel ashamed about it; it's the natural foil to our obsession with the best of the best. Just as we want to know how high in brilliance art can rise, we also want to know how low it can sink in sheer awfulness. Plus, the fact that reviews spewing bile over the many ways something stinks tend to be far more entertaining to read than reviews extolling the virtues of the latest Oscar Bait.
This feeling is sometimes the basis of So Bad, It's Good. What differentiates Bile Fascination from So Bad, It's Good, is the fact it is interesting to discuss the work, even if the consuming the work itself is not enjoyable at all, even in So Bad, It's Enjoyable way. Perhaps it is interesting to discuss how the authors thought this work was a great idea. Or all the conditions that caused that work to be made in the first place.
Distinct from No Such Thing as Bad Publicity in that the criticism is concerning the quality of the work, rather than the content. Compare and contrast Just Here for Godzilla and Watch It for the Meme. Can make the film in question become a Guilty Pleasure for some and, if enough people disagree with the majority, a Cult Classic. Similar to but not quite Schmuck Bait.
Examples:
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Real works:
Advertising
- The infamous GrubHub "Delivery Dance
" commercial has been memed to Hell and back by people who abhor the commercial's lacklustre 3D animation, cringeworthy dancing, and irritating soundtrack.
- The Quiznos Spongmonkeys commercials were essentially the 2000s equivalent of the GrubHub Dance. They were deformed rat-like creatures with jerky Flash moments and they sang a love song about Quiznos' subs. The only reason they gained recognition was because they were loathed so much by the general public for the Spongmonkeys' creepy appearances and annoying voices and were constantly featured on "Top 10 Creepiest/Annoying Commercials" lists, even if they were based on an internet meme.
Anime and Manga
- Abunai Sisters received universally negative reception owing to its low-quality 3D models, grating voice acting (which is in English only and has all of the voices pitched up to the point where everyone sounds like they're on helium), and over-reliance on the Boob-Based Gag, which end up as Fetish Retardant due to the aforementioned graphics and voice acting. The main reason why anyone watches it is to see if it's really that bad.
- Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show: Good. God. The story behind this film speaks for itself. Considered by some to be anime's answer to A Serbian Film or Where the Dead Go to Die, this adaptation of a Suehiro Maruo manga was made by one man with his own money and a handful of largely unknown voice actors because absolutely no studio in Japan at the time would touch it with a ten-foot pole. The end result is a literal freak show of child abuse, body horror, animal cruelty and surreal horror with a Downer Ending that only the morbidly curious would even dare to approach.
- Astroganger: The only reason most people are interested in it is to see if it's bad as the other infamous Knack Productions work, and the janky animation, Unintentional Uncanny Valley and flat characters don't help.
- If there's one thing people who have never read Chagecha know about it, it is the fact that it is the shortest-lived manga to ever be serialized in Shonen Jump Weekly and was cancelled quickly because of the negative reception it got. Even bizarrely, it was written by an author who had already pulled off a popular manga (Yoshio Sawai - he wrote Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo).
- Genocyber attracts the morbidly curious not for any lack of quality, but rather for its reputation as one of - if not the - most violent anime films ever made. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The violence is so detailed and pervasive that it can double as an anatomy lesson.
- People from English speaking countries only know of Her Majesty's Petite Angie due to Anime Bargain Bin's scathing review of its poorly acted UK-based dub. This review is even cited on its Wikipedia page!
- Mars of Destruction is an OVA that finds itself on many lists of the worst anime of all time for its laughably bad quality across the whole board. Characters are hurt several seconds after being shot, a girl has to be taken to the hospital to see if she's alright after losing her head and the entire thing comes across as a terrible Neon Genesis Evangelion ripoff. One can easily call it anime's Plan 9 from Outer Space and many ironic fans treat it as such.
- The 4Kids dub of One Piece tends to get this nowadays. Back in the day, it was a major example of how dubbing can go wrong and was one of the reasons why the series had trouble taking off in the west, until it was finally corrected for the more accurate and censor-free version of the Funimation dub. Now this version is pretty rare to find since it was dropped back in 2007 and many fans tend to seek it out either out of nostalgia, for a laugh or to experience it themselves after seeing clips about it online.
Comic Books
- Cerebus the Aardvark is largely remembered only for this, thanks to creator Dave Sim's Creator Breakdown and later issues of the comic devolving into a mess of anti-feminist ranting.
- Countdown to Final Crisis was the followup to the well-received 52, meant to lead in to Grant Morrison's Final Crisis. However, Countdown was extremely slow-paced despite being a weekly book, the continuity between issues was almost nonexistent, the actual storylines were weak, and the story branched off into tie-in issues so often that many stories never finished within the book. It failed at its mission so thoroughly that Final Crisis ignored everything in the book, and everything was turned into Canon Discontinuity. The only reason for anyone to read it anymore is to see just how bad it really is.
- Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly: The comic takes the premise of Fartillery seriously and depicts most of the characters as unironically having fart fetishes. YouTube reviewers and commentators had a field day with this, questioning why DC would ever legitimize such a bizarre, gross-out thing or be so desperate for readership as to pander to such a niche audience.
- Heroes in Crisis had loads of this, even while it was coming out. With each issue, more people checked out the book just to see why it was so hated by everyone. What they found was a series full of padding, terrible handling of the topic of mental illness, and turning a beloved character into a mass murderer because of Executive Meddling. Immediately after it ended, the series was retconned and undone so that the mass murders never happened in the first place.
- Marville would be completely forgotten if not for this trope. Written by then-president of Marvel Bill Jemas (who had essentially no comic writing experience before this) on a bet, it starts as an unfunny parody of the American media business in the early 00s, becomes an unfunny parody of superhero comics, then turns into a highly inaccurate Author Tract on science, organized religion, and the story ends claiming to have solved world peace. The comic continues with a recap issue, which comes across as a Take That! at comic editors (when this comic itself clearly had Protection from Editors because of being written by the president of the company), and the series finally ends with a submission guide for Marvel's revival of the Epic Comics label, designed to give other creative voices the chance to publish for Marvel with similar creative freedom. That line ended after about a year and the only comic of note it produced was Trouble (Marvel Comics), another comic that fits this trope. In the end, all the comic accomplished was gaining the notoriety of being one of the worst comics ever made.
- Some of the later works of Frank Miller have little to recommend them except this trope:
- All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder is an absolutely bizarre story where Batman kidnaps Dick Grayson Age Twelve, as soon as his parents are killed, forces him to live off of rats captured in the Batcave, calls him "retarded" for not knowing he's the "goddamn Batman" and "queer" for not liking the name "Batmobile", Black Canary is an Irish ninja who travels across the country to meet Batman because she idolizes him, the entire Justice League is made up of absolute idiots to show how much better Batman is than them, and it ends randomly in issue 10 (of the planned 12) because Schedule Slip just got too bad. And this is just scratching the surface of the problems with this book.
- Holy Terror is a book where a Captain Ersatz Batman and Catwoman take on Al-Qaeda, originally meant to be a parody/callback to World War II-era propaganda comics, but due to a combination of Frank Miller's Creator Breakdown and changes made during the Schedule Slip of the book (originally meant as a Batman story until either Miller changed his mind or DC told him they wouldn't publish it) turned it into the type of angry, racist story that it was supposed to be a parody of. Add in the absolutely bizarre artwork, terrible pacing, and the story completely losing touch with reality when suddenly Al-Qaeda starts to resemble the Illuminati, and there are few people will defend this book for anything but the Bile Fascination of reading it.
- Brian Michael Bendis only wrote Legion of Super-Heroes (2020) for roughly three years, but it quickly became the most critically lambasted version of the Legion to date. While veteran fans argued a fresh start was needed following years of retcons and reboots, it gradually became clear Bendis had little to no understanding of why people loved the Legion due to nonexistent character development, rambling dialog, plots that ended up going nowhere, and big amounts of racist subtext. By the end of Justice League Vs Legion of Super-Heroes, the only reason fans bother to look at any of the issues written by Bendis are to see if they really are as boring as people have been saying they are.
- Trouble (Marvel Comics) was Marvel's attempt at reviving 1950s romance comics... by focusing on the teenage sex lives of Peter Parker's parents and his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. The covers feature photos of possibly underage girls in bikinis giving suggestive looks to the readers, and the book inside is no better due to the flat and unlikeable characters. The story eventually takes a turn for the melodramatic, featuring a teen pregnancy plot, where abortion is considered and handled with all of the misaimed Darker and Edgier Black Comedy that Mark Millar is capable of, and reveals that Peter Parker is actually May's son, not Mary's, reaction to which veers from confusing (the timeline makes absolutely no sense) to the offensive (possibly implying May raising Peter means more because he's her biological child, not "just" her nephew by marriage).
- The Unfunnies: What is the book that so embraces Darker and Edgier Black Comedy that even Mark Millar has tried to pretend that it never happened? We'll just tell you: A wacky, Hanna-Barbaraesque cartoon world that devolves into a hellscape of graphic physical and sexual violence like an aristocrats joke that doesn't know when to stop.
Fan Works
- The Conversion Bureau: The Chatoverse is infamous for its liberal use of Purple Prose, incredibly misanthropic premise, as well as the strange and disturbing morality that underlies the setting. While the setting does have its sincere fans, there are an equal number of people who hate the setting and read the stories just to see how bad they are.
- I Will Survive is infamous for its ridiculous premise of Zootopia characters having an extremely melodramatic debate about abortion. While it does have its fans, it has just as many, if not more, haters who nevertheless are fascinated by the very fact that such a story exists, which has resulted in a large number of memes being made about it.
- My Immortal is notorious for being one of the most pain-inducing fanfics on the internet. The story is a deranged, plotless odyssey through the lowest circles of pop culture hell, written in prose so thoroughly mangled and mutilated that you would not be surprised if the author was trying to invent their own language at the exact same time. Whether this was a sincere attempt at literature or an elaborate hoax remains one of the internet's most enduring mysteries.
- The Prayer Warriors (which was confirmed to be a Troll Fic well after its publication) is one of the strangest fanfics written. It tells the story of a Designated Hero slaughtering his way through The Camp Half-Blood Series and the Harry Potter universe as well as the countries of England and Russia. It's Canon Defilement in its purest form, often with a literal meaning of "defilement" here. It's this bad reputation that draws people into reading it in the first place.
Films — Animation
- Doogal, the 2005 North American Gag Dub of the 2005 Magic Roundabout movie, is such a bad localization of a modest CGI film from Europe that it's actually very fascinating. Aside from being a nonsensical and incompetent Cliché Storm, it replaces most of the original British voice actors with big names such as Whoopi Goldberg and Jimmy Fallonnote and rewrites the script to chock it to the rim with Shout Outs and occasional Toilet Humor.
- Foodfight! Where to even begin with this one? It had an unlisted, uncelebrated release and yet it rocketed to notoriety thanks to its infamously Troubled Production, moronic plot, baffling premise, gratuitous Product Placement, disturbingly inappropriate humor and eye-gouging visuals. It is less of a movie and more of a lesson on how not to make an animated film!
- About the only notoriety that's ever been received by Norm of the North is that people heard through word-of-mouth that the film is considered an absolute disaster and sought it out just to see if it's as bad as it's said to be. Believe it or not, the film received three sequels, and yes, they're just as bad as the original.
- Planetata na Sakrovishtata is a unique example of this trope, as its fascination isn't so much about how bad it is, but rather how bizarre it is. And it certainly lives up to the hype without question, thanks to featuring the wonkiest animation that Eastern Europe has to offer and Surreal Humor that feels like it was ripped straight out of a Monty Python cartoon.
- SpongeBob in Tehran has gained widespread mockery from tons of people – especially fans of SpongeBob SquarePants – for its janky 3D animation, connections with one of the original show's more notorious Persian dubs, glorification of Iran, and unauthorized nature.
- Titanic: The Legend Goes On is such a legendary trainwreck that those who haven't seen it question if it genuinely exists or is a leaked college experiment not meant to be seen by humanity.note Besides its nonsensical plot, Stock Footage Failure galore, and Lighter and Softer retelling of a real historical tragedy, the film has a rapping dog on board the Titanic that comes completely out of nowhere and Makes Just as Much Sense in Context. This is the main reason why people watch it.
- The Emoji Movie. In case you can't tell by the name, it's not a very good film. It only really gathered an audience who were morbidly curious about how bad it was - enough for the movie to actually pay for itself, though thankfully not enough for Sony to make a sequel.
- Where the Dead Go to Die is known for being one of, if not, the, worst animated movie of all time, to the point where some reviewers such as PhantomStrider, outright refuse to discuss the film for this very reason. The Mysterious Mr. Enter even called it, “too bad to be an atrocity.” In other words, it’s too terrible to be considered terrible. With a reputation like that, many people can’t help but be curious, just to see how far the movie goes for shock value and disturbing content.
- Dingo Pictures and Vídeo Brinquedo are infamous for the countless Mockbusters that they have made. One can’t help but wonder how bad these films really are. And they are bad. Really, really bad.
Films — Live-Action
- On several occasions 365 Days has been described as "an even worse version of Fifty Shades of Grey". Considering that Fifty Shades is already notorious, some people just had to check out 365 Days to see if it was really that bad. The same applies to the books, especially after they were translated from Polish, as well as the sequels This Day and The Next 365 Days.
- Battlefield Earth: It's not because of its relationship with L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, it's not because of its radioactive levels of Narm, it's not because of its horrid effects and bloated, knuckle-dragging plot, it's all of the above at once.
- A Certain Sacrifice: Infamous for being Madonna's film debut and having No Budget (it was thrown together to capitalize on her fame in 1985, and she immediately disowned it). It can charitably be described as a "slice of life vignettes meets rape-revenge thriller," yet there exists a subset of viewers who nonetheless appreciate it for her performance and the look at New York City at the end of The '70s.
- The Day the Clown Cried: This is considered one of the holy grails of lost media aficionados. It was never released to the public and currently remains in the hands of several film companies and celebrities as a morbid curiosity. Why is it so bad, you ask? Because it holds the dubious distinction of having one of the most alienating premises in cinema history: It's about a clown that entertains children... in Auschwitz.
- David Lynch famously disowned his adaptation of Dune, though many viewers have enjoyed it nonetheless — ironically or otherwise. It's too bad to be a good film, but it's too good to be a bad film. Having Sting play a hamtastic villain in a wing-shaped speedo certainly helps. Curiosity about this loveable trainwreck has multiplied tenfold after the release of Denis Villeneuve's significantly better and more successful two part adaptation.
- Hobgoblins got splattered all over by Mystery Science Theater 3000 for a damn good reason. Ever want to see painful attempts at humor, bad eighties fashion and Fetish Retardant that will make you want to take a vow of celibacy? Or wonder how Daran Norris had a career after this? Well, step this way!
- The Human Centipede: This isn't so much of a movie as it is an endurance test. Specifically of your gag reflex. And the same goes for its two sequels. We uh, we really don't want to give any context for this one.
- Ishtar is a famously awful film, being about lounge singers that get tangled in an international conflict. While most people will gladly watch this terrible movie to see how bad it is, some have found it genuinely enjoyable. Most famous of all being Gary Larson himself.
- The Last Airbender: Those who joined the Avatar fandom after the release of this movie can't help but be curious to know why it was panned to kingdom come. Primary for how disrespectful and inaccurate it is to the source material and for its unintentional comedy.
- Manos: The Hands of Fate: A B-movie rivaled only by Plan 9 in its infamy and pulled out of obscurity by Mystery Science Theater 3000, this is a film that has attracted a cult following for being terrible in just about every possible respect, complete with an incredibly squicky twist ending. It has inspired a book written by the film's youngest actress and it even has its own video game adaptation!
- The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure. Everything about it, from its stupefyingly juvenile premise, baffling marketing gimmicks and its eccentric marketer (Yes, marketer - not creator) who saw actual promise in the film as the starting point of a successful franchise. The end result was the mother of all box office bombs and a car accident of a film that its few viewers just couldn't look away from.
- Plan 9 from Outer Space. To a legendary degree. Its So Bad, It's Good status gives it the distinction of being the most iconic B-movie in cinema history, even receiving a full restoration. People who wonder why this movie is so infamous are rewarded with rampant special effect failures, ridiculous technobabble, terrible acting, a laughable plot and a police detective with zero knowledge of gun safety.
- The Room (2003). A romantic drama and unintentional comedy helmed by the eccentric Tommy Wiseau, this film has earned a massive cult following over the years for becoming the new gold standard in terrible filmmaking and a worthy successor to films like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate with its hysterically bad acting, melodrama and convoluted plot. It has inspired multiple fan-run showings, countless memes and even a biography written by one of its actors.
- A Serbian Film—as if the real-life atrocities of Srebrenica weren't harrowing enough—takes cinematic depravity to unthinkable extremes. Famously banned across multiple nations—including Australia and New Zealand—for being arguably the sickest movie ever produced, it out-sicks even the most extreme Euroshlock films, making even The Human Centipede look like a children's film in comparison. Don't even get started on the notorious "newborn porn" sequence. Yet, people still feel compelled to watch it with the innocent question, "How bad could it be?" (Spoiler: however bad you think, it's worse.)
- The Snowman (2017) was a critical and commercial bomb for a variety of reasons — the meandering mystery plot, its inappropriately serious take on a darkly comedic book looping back to inappropriately comedic (in the process transliterating its protagonist's name to "Harry Hole"), and a disappointing squandering of its All-Star Cast — but is perhaps most infamous for the fact that for whatever reason, by the director's own admission, 10-15% of the film's script wasn't shot due to its Troubled Production. The film received a Newbie Boom in 2023 by audiences appreciating it as So Bad, It's Good material, along with the curiosity of what exactly an incomplete big studio film looks like.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014): With multiple instances of Tainted by the Preview and Michael Bay's involvement given his track record with adaptations of franchises in mind, various TMNT fans only watched the film to see if it actually ruined the franchise. Though most felt that this wasn't the case, others considered the movie to be "pure murdered childhood" and spread the word as such.
- Troll 2, like Plan 9 before it, is so So Bad, It's Good that there's a cast-led-and-featuring documentary called Best Worst Movie celebrating, defending and completely missing the point about why it is so enjoyably terrible.
- Like God's Not Dead and Saving Christmas (2014) before it, atheist/secularist viewers and Trump's critics like to watch The Trump Prophecy because of how unintentionally funny the movie is.
Literature
- The 120 Days of Sodom: For the worst of reasons. Its age and sour reputation (helped in no part by its infamous author) has inspired morbid curiosity in readers who want to see if it really is as depraved as it is said to be. Turns out it is. Like much of the author's surviving works, it's a tour de force of depravity that has been the subject of critical, literary and forensic psychological study and debate.
- 365 Days: After the better-known 2020 film adaptation gained infamy over accusations of romanticizing rape, kidnapping and organized crime, some people began seeking out the original novels to see how they compared. Many readers have opined that, in addition to the questionable writingnote , the films are tame compared the books' outrageous content.
- The Age of Scorpius already had a spotlight on it due to years of Booktok hype and the sheer amount of pre-orders (which were admittedly impressive for a self-published debut). After the negative reviews starting coming in (with a common theme being that the book wasn't remotely ready for publication), the author's public reaction to the poor reception, and the eventual announcement of a complete do-over in the works, many people have now tried to get eyes on an original copy of the novel to see if it's really as bad as its reputation suggests.
- Alfie's Home: Pretty much the only reason anyone would read this would be to see if its homophobic messages are really as bad as everyone says.
- Blood Meridian is not a bad book by any means, but its gruesome content, morbid message and memetically terrifying antagonist, Judge Holden, have drawn in readers curious about why this is considered the darkest western novel ever written.
- Empress Theresa: The book is a literary chemical spill in and of itself to begin with, but when you introduce its very imbalanced author and his obsessive defense of the title, you get a modern-day freak show and a case study in egomania. People who took the time to read this book (or at least about it) are unanimously floored by its staggeringly imbecilic plot.
- The Eye of Argon: So much so that it's become a parlor game at countless science fiction and fantasy conventions. Whoever bursts out laughing at its impossibly dense Purple Prose, Accidental Innuendo, misspellings and Author Appeal has to pass it on to the next person to read aloud. But if you're not interested in laughing at the book, use it as a handy guide on how not to write fantasy fiction.
- The Fellowship of the King: The War of the Rings has been long pursued for two big reasons: it's an illegally published sequel to The Lord of the Rings and it is impossible to find. The Tolkien estate dropped the hammer on this book big time, ordering the destruction of not only all physical copies, but all digital copies as well, making it borderline lost media. For this very reason, it's a part of the Permanent Red Link Club.
- Happyslapped By a Jellyfish is not a bad book, but its... unique author is more than enough of a selling point.
- Juliette: A Marquis de Sade book about a girl who triumphs through life by encouraging and committing the most unspeakable crimes against God and man is more than enough to inspire morbid curiosity. How bad is it? Well, when Napoléon Bonaparte himself gave it a read, he ordered its author to be condemned to an insane asylum for the rest of his life.
- The Legend of Rah and the Muggles: Barely even a blip on the radar were it not for the author's ill-fated infringement lawsuit against J.K. Rowling. And that's not getting into the ridiculous plot and grotesque character designs.
- The Lightlark Saga: After early reviews for Lightlark came out and were generally critical of the novel and the way it was marketed (with some calling it "The Fyre Festival of Booktok"), some people picked up the book mostly to see if it was really that bad. The same applies to Nightbane, with even readers who thought Lightlark was bad admitting they wanted to read the sequel out of morbid curiosity over what crazy direction the series would go in (less cynically, a few readers wanted to see if the author could actually build upon Lightlark's redeeming qualities).
- Org's Odyssey is considered the furry community's answer to The Eye of Argon. The protagonist is a Gary Stu otter-deer-dolphin-angel hybrid being with seven friends that all begin their sentences, one after another, in the exact same way - even if it goes against the most basic rules of prose and grammar. And that's not even getting into its Cliché Storm of an Idiot Plot.
- Reaper's Creek, Stones to Abbigale and This Is Why I Hate You are all horrible books, but what makes them so morbidly fascinating is the man behind them: Onision. Yes, that Onision. Readers of this trilogy unanimously agree that they serve as a look into the mind of a potential mass murderer.
- It's likely the only reason anyone's even heard of the Save the Pearls duology (a YA dystopia that tries to tackle racism via a Persecution Flip) is due to people wanting to check just how bad the portrayal of racism is, after it got huge amounts of criticism for it. It would probably just have been overlooked as one of many teen dystopian novels published at the time if it weren't for this.
- The Turner Diaries is a book written by a white supremacist. Actually, that's putting it lightly; it's a violent white supremacist Power Fantasy, in which our "heroes" carry out mass genocide. Despite being supressed, if not illegal, in several countries for obvious reasons, many people are interested in the book to see how horrific it really is. Especially the FBI, who use it as a way of identifying white supremacist rhetoric, culture and tactics (with its most infamous case being the Oklahoma City Bombing). Even if you (somehow) look past its hateful rhetoric and blatant neo-Nazi propaganda, it's a hilariously badly written book with stilted dialogues, paper-thin "characters", a contrived plot, in which the neo-Nazi protagonists are only able to win because their opponents act like idiots, and an Allegedly Optimistic Ending, in which the entire world is nuked into oblivion and the "white paradise" is created in an irradiated hellhole. What isn't so hilarious is the fact that this book inspired actual violence.
- Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War is another military-political Power Fantasy, this time by a reactionary paleoconservative, in which a group of Right Wing Militia Fanatics go to war against Strawman Political enemies. Despite the fact that it's completely serious, the book reads like a satire along the lines of Judge Dredd, Warhammer 40,000, or (movie) Starship Troopers for being so over-the-top. For example, the author refers to gangsters as "orcs" and calls New York City "The Babylon on the Hudson".
Live-Action TV
- Heil Honey I'm Home! never made it to air (for obvious reasons), but certainly made itself viral, thanks to its premise of Adolf Hitler living with Eva Braun next to a Jewish family in the style of a 50s sitcom. You read that correctly.
- The I-Land: Seems to be the primary reason to watch. More than one review has called it not only Netflix's worst original series, but one of the worst shows ever made. Between universally scathing reviews and the heavy involvement of notorious misogynist Neil LaBute as scriptwriter (leading to lines such as "I didn't try to rape you. There's no such thing like that in a place like this. There's only sex and no sex."), the series has inspired some critics to advise viewers to watch it as a sort of science experiment. It's been called "bafflingly horrible" and currently has an approval rating of 8% on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Upon release, Milf Manor by TLC quickly rose to prominence as one of the worst dating shows ever conceived. Eight mother-son pairs were flown to a Reality TV Show Mansion in Mexico to compete for the other contestants' sons and moms while sharing a room with their own biological relation. Aside from being contrived to set up all manner of I Banged Your Mom and Mama Bear conflicts among the men and women, and uncomfortably flirting with incest, commentators noted it sounded astoundingly similar to an Audience-Alienating Premise parody show from 30 Rock named Milf Island devised by Corrupt Corporate Executive Jack Donaghy. Many viewers remarked on Twitter they only kept watching to see how awful it would get. The show currently sits at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described by critics as "psychological torture" and "Freudian horror".
- The Star Wars Holiday Special is considered by critics, viewers, writers and George Lucas himself to be the worst thing to happen in television history. It's what happens when you get terrible communication with producers and hire writers with tons of experience in writing for corny variety shows and zero familiarity with Star Wars canon. The end result is a bizarre, plodding, hysterical aberration of entertainment that meanders in and out of skits that are either cheesy, disturbing, aimless or outright boring. Plus, untranslated Wookie family drama as a clumsy framing device. It only aired once and is remembered by all of its surviving actors as a steaming turd, ensuring that it will remain an object of morbid curiosity for generations to come.
- Peppermint Park has drawn in audiences online... and straight into the uncanny valley with its creepily low-quality puppets and blatant attempts to ride the coattails of Sesame Street.
- The Doctor Who episode "Love & Monsters" has gained this reputation, partly for the unexciting Lower-Deck Episode plot, but mainly for its notoriously squicky ending.
Music
- Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler, the debut album of Waking the Cadaver, has become a byword for "terrible music" in the metal community thanks to its repetitive musicianship, indecipherable vocals even by death metal standards, and lyrics that try to be scary but come across as puerile. While the band have grown significantly as artists since then, they will probably never escape this album's shadow.
- This trope (along with OneyPlays) is the sole reason anyone still remembers the L33tStr33t Boys. Their music and lyrics appeal to anime and gaming culture so aggressively that newcomers couldn't believe the band's sincerity and lack of self-awareness. Reading the lyrics will have you laughing, cringing or cringe-laughing.
- 6ix9ine's "GOOBA" became the biggest debut for a rap song on YouTube of all time note due to it being the first single 6ix9ine recorded after snitching on the Bloods. The fact that the song is of him bragging about snitching while his face morphs into an animoji of a rat - after saying in court that his 6ix9ine persona was just something he did to sell records, then coming right back to it - landed the song on many a 'worst songs of 2020' list. It also hit 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. NME called 6ix9ine "the most hatewatched man in rap."
- Farrah Abraham's My Teenage Dream Ended is a Cult Classic of an album that's become infamous for existing in a reputation between this and genuine critical admiration. The debut album of a nascent artist who knew very little about music and enforced odd creative direction on the producers, it was widely blasted for just how bizarrely it mangled its attempt at being a sharp dance pop album, filled with ridiculously atonal instrumentals amidst heavily auto-tuned vocals that never properly mixes together. This actually ended up being a point that critics became fascinated with — Abraham and co were so off course that it shot the moon and accidentally became an intriguing bit of avant-garde outsider music, which has been enough to earn it a degree of sincere prestige and placements on "best-of" lists. Even if you aren't into the Accidental Art angle, it's still experimental and weird enough to have drawn a long-term audience of varying levels of irony.
- Exploring this concept was part of the intent behind "The Most Unwanted Song" as part of the The People's Choice Music project. The two-part EP — the other track being "The Most Wanted Song" — was designed to satirize the nature of opinion polling and focus groups, being prompted by a large online poll over what were the most desirable and least desirable elements of music that people wanted, with each song being a synthesis of those two categories. "The Most Wanted Song" is a perfectly serviceable, but incredibly generic and forgettable love ballad, but "The Most Unwanted Song" is complete chaos; a 21-minute-long cacophony of opera singers performing bizarre cowboy raps, children's choirs, advertising jingles encouraging the listener to shop at Walmart, bagpipes, political slogans, and much more. Ironically yet unsurprisingly, "The Most Unwanted Song" is the more famous and popular of the two, drawing interest for being virtually unlistenable, but at least being interesting.
Tabletop Games
- F.A.T.A.L. is known solely for being a theatrically egregious example of how not to make a roleplaying game. Complete with bafflingly convoluted and self-contradictory rules, vicious misogyny and racism, and extreme amounts of sexual deviancy of every stripe and sort. If you look up any discussion about the game, it's usually about how bad it is.
- Racial Holy War is a tabletop RPG created by a white supremacist group. There are two things that make the game oddly fascinating: firstly, there's its ludicrously offensive premise, which involves "White Warriors" slaughtering racist caricatures, with each race having a different ability based on stereotypes (black people use Weaponized Stench to lower players' accuracy, Arabs can do a Suicide Attack, Greedy Jews can bribe players). Second, and just as infamous, are its rules, which are woefully unfinished: the game was originally written without any stats for weapons or ways of calculating accuracy; even after an update fixed this, there are still gameplay mechanics that are either not elaborated upon or boil down to "the Game Master can decide how to interpret this mechanic". Many people, especially of the anti-fascist sort, use it as evidence of how hateful, evil and just plain stupid Neo-Nazi culture really is.
- The earliest editions of Warhammer 40,000 featured artwork that was less "grimdark" and more "it came from the 1980s." Beak-shaped helmets, ludicrously massive guns and the biggest mohawks you will ever see await you. Longtime fans always like to look back at these just to see how far the franchise has come, though some miss that era and think the new material takes itself too seriously.
Theatre
- This trope was the major reason why the Cherry Sisters were popular during the 1890s: Because their act Something Good, Something Sad was so terrible, it looped back into being entertaining for audiences. This was also the reason why the Olympia Music Hall managed to save itself from bankruptcy: According to Willie Hammerstein in an interview, "I've been putting on the best talent, and it hasn't gone over... I'm going to try the worst.". Sadly, their last recording was destroyed in the seventies, so all we can really do is imagine how bad it was.
Video Games
- Action 52 is an unlicensed compilation game released in 1991 for the NES, and later in 1993 for the Sega Genesis. On release, it retailed for $199 USD, a high price for any game, and especially for a crappy minigame collection in 1991. It is widely known for its extremely poor quality, as most of the games included are extremely glitchy, crash often and consistently, or are even non-functional. It's also known for its failed attempt to launch The Cheetahmen franchise, which was planned to become a franchise among the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Most people attempting to play the game nowadays would likely only be doing so due to its less than stellar reputation.
- Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing because it is considered one of the best examples (if not the best example) of an Obvious Beta—even the "beta" label is generous, as it's closer to a very rough pre-alpha like you'd see within the first few weeks of development. There's no collision detection, no physics engine, no map boundaries, and no AI for the computer driver (this was later patched so they move along a pre-determined path, stopping right before the finish line because the game has no lose condition for the player). This makes it practically worthless as an actual game, yet it's developed a near-literal cult following who treat it as the greatest game of all time. Its lack of anything to do just happens to give the player a lot of freedom: since you can't lose, you can just drive anywhere on the map, go through solid walls or straight up vertical cliffs, and explore an infinite white void that lies outside the map borders. One particularly notable Good Bad Bug allows your truck to accelerate to literal infinite speeds—but only in reverse. The Big Rigs truck itself has also built up a Memetic Badass reputation as a result: it ignores all obstacles, can move faster than light, and is literally incapable of being defeated in any way.
- Bubsy 3D: A series of contested quality to begin with decided to go for innovation for its third installment. It succeeded somewhat, at least initially - at the time the only other games of a similar scale were Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot, both of which released around the same time, with the former also (naturally) being a Nintendo 64 exclusive and the latter having gameplay closer to a 2D platformer (think something along the lines of Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island meets Donkey Kong Country, but with more polygons!) - but then almost immediately afterward the Video Game 3D Leap really started to take off, and plenty of developers were quick to show how it's really done. It wasn't long before the game started looking horribly garish in comparison, and the retrospective was brutal. Condemned by History is putting it mildly. Of course, all that is the main reason why most people are interested in this game nowadays.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III: The game, especially the campaign, got a lot of attention due to how poorly received it was. From the incredibly short runtime to the infamous Open Combat Missions, constant Pandering to the Base, a few Narm inducing scenes, and on top of that, the decision to kill off Soap and Shepherd in the most undignified and unsatisfying manner, respectively, the campaign was widely panned for playing out like a half-baked DLC for the previous game to the tune of $70. The game's multiplayer was better received, albeit fairly status quo for the franchise.
- Concord was a live-service Hero Shooter game whose initial reactions were intensely vitriolic due to a combination of appearing heavily derivative of Guardians of the Galaxy and basically every other popular hero shooter like Overwatch and Apex Legends. Upon the game launching in August 2024, only 25,000 copies were moved, and the game's concurrent player count never broke over 700 people, despite Concord costing hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. This caused Sony to shut the game down (with developer Firewalk Studios soon to follow) and refund those who bought it in less than two weeks. That alone is already an unprecedented level of failure, but it was made even more glaring considering the money and time invested in it — the game reportedly burned through a budget of $200 million over eight years, with some rumors claiming the final price tag could be as much as twice that number when factoring in the amount of money that Sony spent to acquire Firewalk Studios in 2023. Also, the higher-ups at Sony treated Concord as their next big smash-hit IP (described by devs as SIE CEO Hermen Hulst's "baby"), with massive, ambitious plans for a multimedia franchise on the level of Star Wars. These circumstances led to audiences and critics flocking to see what went wrong with the game that caused it and its long-term ambitions to die as abruptly and ignobly as it did, seen as a massive case study of Skewed Priorities and wasteful hubris in AAA game development.
- CrazyBus: This is the reason behind why the game is so popular in the first place despite being something someone bored could've coded up one lazy afternoon. It's a tech demo, a sample application provided with a third-party compiler toolchain and you're supposed to study the game's source code and learn how to program using the toolchain from there. And yet all people are after is the ROM generated by the compiler. And then there's its annoying theme.
- Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600: Despite having a very Audience-Alienating Premise where the player accumulates points by raping a Native American woman tied to a cactus while dodging arrow fire, the game still managed to sell a decent 80,000 copies approximately in its day, mostly because people first heard about it from the protests against it by feminists and anti-racist activists, and were curious as to just how bad it really is. The general consensus reached, however, is that the game really is that bad, not only for its cringe-inducing premise but for its repetitively barebones gameplay, even by the standards of Atari 2600 games.
- Decentraland became a massive controversy magnet in the early 2020s due to its high publicity from riding on two of the most polarizing tech trends of the era: blockchain technology (specifically NFTs) and The Metaverse. Despite receiving investments in the millions of dollars, with marketing and news coverage hyping it up, it was still widely criticized from the get-go by technology and video game journalists for being overambitious and extremely flawed (trying to push itself as a virtual world beyond the likes of Second Life or VRChat simply by having NFTs as the central form of user-created assets), with most casual discussion beyond its niche group of crypto/metaverse investors taking the form of people seeing just how exploitative and hilariously scuffed it actually is. Even during the cryptocurrency boom between 2021-2022, Decentraland built up a reputation of being shockingly empty and devoid of development, with the scene's infamously overzealous holdouts attempting to paint the tech as "just being early" earning it wider ridicule. Following the crypto bubble popping in 2023, Decentraland has become almost completely deserted — littered with broken games, abandoned blockchain environments, and a small community most known for its intense level of moderation and censorship over any criticisms to the game (again, as part of a decentralized platform) — and the whole enterprise is largely known as the symbol of a disastrous attempt to hype into existence "the next big thing" in technology.
- Devil May Cry 2: While some fans are willing to acknowledge the game has a few redeeming qualities, it is generally accepted that DMC2 is the weakest entry of the original series (with some even going as far to say it's the weakest entry of the entire DMC series, Ninja Theory's reboot included), owing to its poor combat system, underwhelming boss fights and forgettable story. As such, quite a few people check out this game only to see if it's truly as bad as others say.
- Dustborn: The game is seen by many as mediocre at best, and it would have been buried in obscurity were it not for the notoriety it gained due to how infamously on-the-nose it is politically.
- Ethnic Cleansing: If the name alone doesn't put you off then the details will. It's pretty much a video game adaptation of Racial Holy War that has gained a ton of infamy for its ridiculously unfinished release state and its unapologetic promotion of white supremacism.
- The Frontier: Hoo boy. This Fallout: New Vegas mod gets all its publicity and attention from the maelstrom of controversy that surrounds the game like a dense fog. Spectators to this disaster are treated to unfortunate implications, Canon Defilement, unsettling fetishistic undertones, poor writing, developer scandals and a behind-the-scenes civil war.
- The NES version of Ghostbusters. While the original Commodore 64 game, as well as the Atari 2600 and Sega Master System versions, were all considered decent games in their time, the NES version has earned itself an overwhelmingly negative reputation for an unfortunate combination of being difficult and boring, leaving curiosity as to just how bad it is as the only reason to play the game. The only positive thing that can be said about this version is the unintentionally hilarious "Blind Idiot" Translation that is its ending, which has become memetic.
- From the moment the game was revealed on the high pedestal of the Game Awards 2025 to disastrous reception, Highguard became the gaming community's punching bag as a disaster in the making, with its bland aesthetic, derivative and unambitious gameplay, and tone-deaf ambitions immediately drawing comparisons to Concord, another high-profile live-service failure fresh on everyone's minds, whose catastrophic mistakes seemed to be repeated without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Almost all of the public discourse surrounding the game was documenting its many gameplay flaws, its rapidly-dwindling player counts, and the developers' increasingly dire setbacks, with it not being a question of "if" or even "when" would the game finally go defunct, but "how fast" (in the end, 45 days).
- Hoshi wo Miru Hito earned an ironic fandom and its long-lasting reputation as the "densetsu no kusoge", or "legendary shitty game", due to being an Obvious Beta, leading many of its players to play it just to see for themselves its many problems such as unbalanced gameplay and uncomfortably high-pitched music. Resulting Japanese fan demand led to two unofficial remakes and a Nintendo Switch port of the game, further exposing it to a wider audience curious to see how entertainingly low-quality it is.
- The Last Resurrection is an indie RPG from the early 2000s, and it reeks of the early 2000s. From the poor spelling to the bad art style to the ham-fisted anti-Christian message, it's attracted an audience for being that bad. Jesus is a Card-Carrying Villain who leads the Nazis and wants to kill everybody. Yes, really.
- The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was first announced in 2019 with little fanfare, but upon its eventual release in 2023, it rapidly caught word-of-mouth attention in the worst way imaginable due to being utterly eviscerated by critics and casual players alike, with audiences — even those who aren't interested in Tolkien's Legendarium — flocking to see how bad someone would have to botch a game based on a beloved IP for it to earn immediate "potential worst game of the decade" status.
- Michigan: Report From Hell: What keeps people coming back to this otherwise obscure game is its astonishingly bad voice-acting.
- Ninjabread Man: The only reason most people have any interest in this game. That and the title. It's a Shovelware game for the PlayStation 2 and Wii, consoles already notorious for all of the shovelware that got dumped onto them. Originally planned to be a new Zool game, the publishers were appalled by the game's poor quality and axed the game, leading to the developers changing the character and title to be a standalone game. What makes this game stand out among all of the said shovelware is that it has has three different reskins of it: Anubis II, Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland, and Rock 'n' Roll Adventures.
- The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man: The Trope Codifier for Porting Disaster. Hilariously in Hindsight, the Atari 2600 ports of Ms. and Jr. Pac-Man were Polished Ports. Add the many re-releases of the original Arcade version on multiple platforms, as well as fan-favorite Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, and there's absolutely no reason to play Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 other than curiosity as to how bad it is.
- Paper Mario: Sticker Star: Given its reputation as the weakest Paper Mario, some have played just to see if Sticker Star is really that bad. General points of contention are a barebones plotline that relies on artificial scarcity that feels like Fake Difficulty, a stripped-back story even by the standards of a Mario title, every boss being a Puzzle Boss with too much emphasis on the "puzzle" part leading to frustrating combat, and a distinct lack of humor which Paper Mario was known for. In particular, the fact that running away from battle is a borderline Game-Breaker because of its utility is a big point of contention — since winning a fight costs you stickers and only gives you coins for victory, the game treats running away as if you'd won a battle not only for the resources you receive, but because you won't waste your precious stickers. This is seen as the game encouraging the player to not play it. On top that, Kersti is The Scrappy among Paper Mario fans for her characterization that sometimes involves yelling at Mario while also being an Annoying Video Game Helper. Combine all this, and players who engage with the title tend to be more interested in Sticker Star as "that bad Paper Mario game" than its own merits.
- Ride to Hell: Retribution: The hordes of glitches both amusing and annoying, repetitive and shallow gameplay, paper-thin story, laughable voice-acting, pointless sex scenes where the characters keep their clothes on the entire time, and the illogical and dickish actions of the main character (most famously the scene where he blows up a power plant just to shut off an electric fence) have led to the game becoming renowned as a masterpiece of awfulness that gamers play solely to see how bad it can get.
- Skull Island: Rise of Kong: The game is a low-effort licensed shovelware that does a huge disservice to its source material and is clearly just a forgettable cash-grab, but it garnered a lot of attention upon its release due to just how rushed it was, with many considering it a strong candidate for worst game of 2023, and a number of people checked out the game solely for that.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): People who play this game today play it to see if it really is as much of a broken mess as its reputation suggests.
- Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is said to be just as bad as, if not worse than, 06. People mostly just play this game to pick apart every last flaw, from its motherload of glitches, constant voice clips, and less-than-impressive gameplay. And let's not forget the constant hints that seem to assume that the player has the intelligence of a sea monkey... like suggesting that ramps can be used as ramps.
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was already fraught with a ton of bad publicity prior in the months-turned-years before release for a multitude of reasons, from concerns over the game being a follow-up to the beloved Batman: Arkham Series as well as the controversial live-service gameplay model alienating fans, with many expecting to only approach the game from a distance. However, general animosity turned into this trope when the game was finally released and word got out of just how bad its plot actually was, with the game's handling of genuinely killing off the Justice League, including Batman in what was advertised as the late Kevin Conroy's Swan Song for the character drawing such backlash that more fans flocked to see if it really was as baffling and tone-deaf as claimed.
- Superman 64 is infamously known for its laughable story, the "kryptonite fog" used as an excuse for the game's terrible draw distance, the shoddy controls, the massive amount of levels that amount to just flying through rings, and the many bugs and glitches that can be either hilarious, a game breaker, or game breaking hilarious. ProtonJon covered the game so that no one else would have to play it and she tried to discourage people from playing it, but they went and bought/tried the game anyway just to see for themselves how bad it really was.
- Transformers: Convoy no Nazo got an emulated rerelease on the Wii Virtual Console in Japan, most likely due to its very notoriety as a low-quality, unreasonably difficult Licensed Game. That, and its epilepsy-inducing intro.
- Nintendo products beyond the actual games themselves:
- The Virtual Boy is infamous as one of Nintendo's biggest blunders: advertised as a portable virtual reality console decades before such technology could be realistically pulled off, it was such an immediate failure that it almost completely irreparably destroyed the company's faith in stereoscopic 3D (at least until the Nintendo 3DS took off) and was almost completely buried by the company for years (even since then, it's almost exclusively mentioned in a self-deprecating manner). Naturally, this makes newer audiences curious over just how bad it really was, often being the first stop to anyone looking into the history of Nintendo's failures.
- Nintendo Switch cartridges are very small and could present a choking hazard if a child put one in their mouth. To avoid this, they're sprayed with denatonium benzoate, a harmless chemical that tastes horribly bitter... which led to a brief fad, shortly after the system's initial release, of people licking Switch game cartridges just to see how bad it was.
- The Walking Dead: Destinies: Having been touted as an ambitious game where players could rewrite the most important events of The Walking Dead (2010), the game turned out to be a broken mess with graphics more appropriate for a budget smartphone game, frustrating and repetitive gameplay, and mountains of bugs. It wasn't long before dozens of videos were being made about the game's low quality, which led to morbidly curious gamers seeking it out just to see it for themselves.
Webcomics
- Billy the Heretic: Notable for being possibly the first webcomic made by neo-Nazis for neo-Nazis, pretty much the only reason anyone reads the comic is to see how bad it really is.
- Nixvir has gathered a small fandom who follows its content largely to see the terrible art, odd writing choices and the writer's Creator Provincialism overtaking much of the content to its detriment. The author's other works are treated much in the same vein, as those few who hear of the webcomic follow down to see just how bad the rest of the work can be. Furthermore, what fame Nixvir has is generally secondary to the controversial views of the author, especially their transphobia and pro-imperialistic opinions.
- Sinfest: These days, the amount of unironic fans of the comic has dwindled to a very small fraction of their former numbers, but it has picked up a few gawkers. Notably, it's managed to offend both sides of the internet culture war with the long-running events of the Sisterhood arc, and both sides agreed to mock it together. Once the comic made its second radical shift from far-left to far-right, the mockery only increased, with its caricatures of the LGBTQ+ and leftists being viewed as exaggerated to the point of absurdity. The Sinfest subreddit is, essentially, devoted to criticizing and making fun of the modern comic and its creator at every opportunity when it's not looking to the past.
- Most readers of Sonichu do so in order to see the shockingly bad artwork, the graphic content existing side-by-side with juvenile plots, and its completely convoluted story. And that's without mentioning how it was heavily influenced by the life of its notorious creator.
Web Original
- Dusk's Dawn is considered by many Bronies to be their subculture's answer to The Room (2003). Clunky animation, laughably amateurish writing and cheap voice acting is the name of the game here.
- The Painter: The series grabbed attention for its very controversial themes, that many see as "senseless shock value" and its lack of plot development, leading to some calling it "the worst Analog Horror series". Add the drama that revolves around its creator and the result is one of the most (in)famous series on Youtube, and what many people use as an example on how to not write a horror story.
- The Red Ape Family immediately gathered infamy and had many memes and YouTubers making fun of it. There were many reasons for it: 1) It was entirely based on Non-Fungible Tokens (specifically the "Bored Ape" collection), a controversial and widely hated technology; 2) the voice acting is poor and it is barely animated; 3) The Twitter account for it was overhyping the show to the point of delusion, calling its first episode "already a masterpiece". It's a dumpster fire and many, many people were eager to watch it smoulder.
- A variation whereby the creator themselves isn't bad, but the stuff they present is; New England Wildlife and More gained popularity for his presentation of decades-old food products; people flocked to his channel to see how awful the food is after several decades.
- Star Giant Productions used to be an editor for The Mysterious Mr. Enter, until he was fired for multiple reasons. The editing of Star Giant is infamous for being sloppy, poorly-timed, and hastily done. His own reviews (which were lost due to deleting his original channel, but have been archived) are not much better, if at all, due to some very unusual and nonsensical takes.
- Many people heard of Spider-Man: Lotus through the many controversies it and its production found itself in, and were anticipating its eventual release just to see how much of a trainwreck it would end up being. When the movie actually came out, that also shifted to how bad those who watched it claimed it to be.
- To Boldly Flee: While initially seen as a fairly admirable effort at the time and enjoyed by the fanbase, the film now is viewed almost exclusively as a fascinatingly incompetent demonstration of Doug Walker's directing style, mocked for its bizarre and amateur production, plot and acting and excessive length, with many watching it just to see how bad it really is, as well as the story surrounding its tumultuous production.
- YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind will go down in history as the most disliked video on YouTube, accumulating over 20 million dislikes, surpassing even Justin Bieber's "Baby".note Its backlash was driven by avoidable flaws, including the omission of major cultural moments like the PewDiePie vs. T-Series saga, which drew audiences curious to see what went wrong.
Western Animation
- Allen Gregory has been sought out by fans thanks to a heaping helping of the Streisand Effect, brought on by Fox's zealous attempts to ensure that the show remains buried and forgotten. Why would people want to watch it and why would Fox not want that? Simple: ugly characters with even uglier personalities, viciously mean-spirited humor, homophobic subtexts and a Teacher/Student Romance subplot that's portrayed in the most stomach-churning way possible.
- Arthur:
- "Arthur's Big Hit" is one of the most infamous episodes of the series because of its mishandling of its anti-violence message, so naturally, people watch it to confirm if the episode is as bad as fans say it is.
- For many, the main reason to watch "So Funny I Forgot to Laugh" is to see in awe how wildly off the characters are in this episode.
- Big Mouth has landed a spot on its page because of the controversy over its premise as an edgy, no-holds-barred comedy about puberty. Those who decided to take a chance and see for themselves are divided into two camps: those who have found it to be the funniest cartoon in years, and those who were unimpressed by its ugly and unusual art style, crass humor and uncomfortable subject matter... which just seemed to get worse and worse with its egregious Seasonal Rot.
- Its Spiritual Successor, Mating Season, attracted significant morbid curiosity before the first trailer was even released. In part because it was by the same creators, but also because they seemed to be desperately trying to appeal to the furry demographic - who took so much issue with the teaser poster's character designs that many took to redesigning them.
- Viewers who lost their appetite while watching The Brothers Grunt were hard-pressed to imagine that this was made by the same minds behind Ed, Edd n Eddy. Onlookers will be drawn in by its one-note premise, nightmarish gross-out humor and a cast of characters so ghoulish that it looks like they lead lives of unspeakable agony.
- Being a blatant knockoff of Bluey and made by a conservative right-wing media company, Chip Chilla has elicited this reaction from many.
- Many viewers only watch Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island due to it gaining infamy for being a rip-off of SpongeBob SquarePants and because Rob Paulsen stated that this was his least favourite voice acting role.
- Due to High Guardian Spice's very controversial nature within Crunchyroll's community, many people checked it out to see what people were getting in such an uproar over. But those expecting (hoping?) to see an epic disaster were instead disappointed to find a show that's merely thoroughly mediocre… which arguably makes it worse since an outright disaster would at least be somewhat entertaining with how terrible it was. It's often cited as the quintessential Exhibit A of how not to write a show as it does everything wrong in such an inoffensive way and has so few defenders that anyone can openly criticize any aspect of it without fearing much, if any, fan retaliation — critics and the like heavily encourage anyone interested in storytelling or creating media to watch this show to learn from its mistakes and discuss them among their peers.
- Some people only watch Mega Babies just to see how strong their stomachs are. Others in disbelief that it was by the same people who made the vastly superior SWAT Kats. If you think you can handle the sight of characters that spew almost every kind of bodily product, including literal towers of fecal matter, then by all means tune into this tour de force of Sensory Abuse.
- Thanks to its appearance in countless memes and just as many countdowns of the worst cartoons (and its infamous theme song), The Nutshack has made quite the name for itself.
- The Problem Solverz: The ironic appeal of this show isn't "bile fascination" so much as it is "sensory masochism." The first thing anyone will ever mention about this series is the torturous combination of hideous character designs and art direction that is so visually upsetting that it seems like it was deliberately intended to induce photosensitive epilepsy in its viewers. If you want to know how bad it is, The Mysterious Mr. Enter was diagnosed with pseudomyopia shortly after suffering headaches from watching an episode, implying that this show can actually hurt people.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa: Long considered lost for several years, this trainwreck only aired once on The WB. Viewers are unanimously awestruck by how this steaming heap managed to make it on NATIONAL TV.
- Peanuts: It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown's surreal premise, use of the Roger Rabbit Effect, the widely negative reception it got, and the complete disownment by Schulz have made it a source of intrigue by fans, who tend to watch it to see just how bad it is. It's to the point that it is one of the more sought-after specials because of its reputation and obscurity, with used VHS copies going up for hundreds of dollars in secondhand stores.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
- Fans tend to watch the absolutely despised "Town and Out" (for its realistic nature) and "Moral Decay" (for Buttercup grasping the Jerkass Ball quite hard) just to see how bad they are.
- To a further extent, fans of the original just watch the reboot just to pick apart everything wrong with it for how it changed everything about the original show.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- After hearing about the universal hatred for the episode "A Pal for Gary" — SpongeBob adopts a sea creature as a pet and grabs the Idiot Ball with such crushing force that he cannot see how much of a mortal threat it is to Gary, his actual pet — many people found themselves wondering just how awful it could be, watched it themselves and immediately regretted it afterwards.
- Many watched "One Coarse Meal" to see how bad it is, which starts from its concept: Mr. Krabs torments Plankton with his own fear of whales, so much so that Plankton becomes suicidal. It says something when even many of the cast members of the show say they've regretted making this episode.
- The South Park episode "Stanley's Cup" has received tons of backlash from many fans for its aggressively depressing ending and tone-deaf approach to pediatric cancer, often making it to many "Worst South Park Episodes" lists. Because of this, many people became curious as to why the episode was so bad, decided to watch it themselves, saw the point and immediately regretted it afterwards.
- There are only two reasons why anyone would willingly watch Velma: One is that they’ve never heard of its reputation and viewed out of pure curiosity due to its association with the Scooby-Doo brand. The other is that they do actually know of its reputation and just wonder why it has been panned every which way. From Velma being one of the most unlikeable protagonists in all of Western Animation (and the rest of the cast in general as well), to the show having little to do with the Scooby-Doo franchise, to the jokes being unfunny, and to the overall disrespect that this show has towards its audience.
- The Wacky World of Tex Avery fits into this trope very easily, thanks to the immense hype about it being a ghoulish bastardization of Tex Avery's legacy and style of humor.
- Yo Yogi!: Its attempts at being Totally Radical bombed so badly so that it nearly killed Hanna-Barbera, the show being observed as a warning on how being out of touch with your target demographic can easily destroy a company and its legacy.
In-Universe works:
Anime and Manga
- In Shangri-La Frontier, Sunraku's hit by a severe case of this, being a passionated trash-game hunter who spend his whole life buying and playing bug-ridded, Nintendo Hard shitty VR games, usually hard to find because they were total failures for the enterprise or very less-known. And then he's convinced to play the most popular VRMMORPG in Japan...
Fan Works
- Ace Lives: In Chapter 19, despite the increasing amount of embarrassment and humiliation everyone is feeling, no one can find it in themselves to stop Whitebeard and Kaido from airing all the dirt they have on each other from their time together on the Rocks Pirates. It's explicitly compared to a slow-motion ship collision that you can't look away from, no matter how much you want to.
- The Home Series: Mike loves anything that would otherwise get a negative reaction from the average customer, such as watching B-grade horror movies with cheesy special effects or playing incredibly hard or boring games. In the latter case, this is in spite of his constant complaining. His choice of costume for the Halloween party in Almost Feels Like Home is dictated by this interest, alongside necessity: upon finding one of William Afton's old suits, he finds it so gaudy and ridiculous he can't bring himself to look away... until he decides that's precisely why it's perfect for a Halloween costume. He does have his limits, however, as shown by his trip to Chipper's and Sons. Mike cannot even bring himself to snark at the cringe-worthy spectacle falling apart before him.
- My Hero Academia: Ultra Achievement: Back when he was in his early years of heroing (and somewhat strapped for cash), All Might signed over the rights to make a movie based on him to a debuting director. The end result, Brawl Knight: I Have Arrived!, was considered so cheesy that All Might not only became extremely wary of signing anything else over ever again, but he also fought to get the rights to his movie image back and rounded up every copy he could find to destroy it. Izuku has one copy and invites all of his classmates to watch it, whereupon they all agree that (a) it is as horribly cheesy as they were told, and (b) the best actor in the movie was a dog.
Films — Live-Action
- In Liar Liar, this is the only reason Judge Stevens allows Fletcher to call Samantha Cole to the stand. He's completely and utterly fed up with how much of a joke the trial has been, and pretty much already made up his mind that Samantha's ex-husband will win the case, but he just has to see what Fletcher is going to do next.
Judge: Mr. Reede, it is out of sheer morbid curiosity I'm allowing this... freak show to continue! Mrs. Cole? If you dare.
- Star Trek: Generations: After installing the emotions chip that Dr. Soong made for him, Data tries a drink for the first time. He finds the drink unagreeable, but can't get enough of it. (In this case, the fascination is quite literal; Data has never experienced having emotions before, and is clearly entranced by the feelings of hatred and disgust.)
Guinan: Well, it looks like he hates it.
Data: ...yes, that is it! I hate this!
Geordi: Data, I think the chip is working.
Data: (takes another swing) UGH! Yes! I HATE this! It is REVOLTING!
Guinan: More?
Data: Please!
Literature
- In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Greg and his dad can't resist reading the dreadful newspaper comic Li'l Cutie (a parody of The Family Circus) just to see how bad it is. (One of the captions for a Li'l Cutie comic was, "Daddy, is rain just God sweating?")
- Discworld has the historical figure of Bergholt Stuttley 'Bloody Stupid' Johnson, a man who took Bungling Inventor and Bizarrchitecture and elevated them to art forms. His creations ranged from merely useless (a range of monuments less than an inch high) to somewhat alarming (a manicure device mainly used to peel potatoes, a fountain capable of launching a stone cherub a thousand feet in the air) to reality breaking (a row of houses that refused to confirm to Euclidean geometry). His crowning achievement was a mail-sorting machine - containing a wheel for which the value of pi is exactly three - that threatened to destroy the universe. As for how he kept receiving commissions to build this stuff; half of it was rich idiots showing off that they had money to spend on things that were worse than useless, and the other half was a sick curiosity about what he would do next.
- VTuber Legend: Nekoma has an inordinate love of terrible games and movies, and a great portion of her streaming content is about those.
- Gettin Back On Dave Regan: Tom is carrying a box of fresh fish from Sydney by train and coach, intended for a publican in Gulgong. However, due to the hot weather, the fish begin to spoil and emit a powerful stench, and everyone wanted to smell it to see how bad it was.
Live-Action TV
- In Cobra Kai, this is more or less the primary reason the Sekai Taikai moderators allow both Cobra Kai and Johnny and Daniel's combined dojo compete. When made to choose between the two they almost immediately decide that Cobra Kai is the superior dojo, but as they've never seen a dojo quite like the combined Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang, they are so bemused and morbidly curious of what it could bring to the Sekai Taikai that they allow them to compete as well. The secondary reason being Johnny manages to bond with the German moderator over their shared love of Rocky IV and bad-assery.
Theater
- In the musical version of The Producers, the opening song implies that the only reason people still go to see the shows Max Bialystock produces is to see for themselves just how much of a disaster it's going to be.
Video Games
- One of the sidequests you can tackle in Bug Fables involves finding three bad books to give to a wasp named Reeves. He wants them because of this trope.
- An event◊ in The New Order: Last Days of Europe describes an Alternate History book (or more accurately an Alternate History Wank) called The Greatest Story Never Told. The cover has a badly hand-drawn illustration of a tank with the Dixie flag and the contents aren't much better. It claims that Nazi Germany is controlled by Jews among many other absurd things. People end up buying the book because it's so unintentionally funny.
- During the limited time Simulanka event in Genshin Impact, numerous people in-universe borrow the book ''Reasoning Knows Not The Time of Day, But Suspense Always Follows a Blizzard," both because there's supposed to be a mystery surrounding the names circled in it and because it's reputed to be terrible. What you hear of it is pretty bad, with the culprit levitating over a broken bridge to make his initial getaway, which was apparently not hinted at all in the novel before the reveal.
- In Psychonauts, the Straw Critic Jasper Rolls (who is Gloria von Gouten's inner critic) believes that Bonita Soilel's plays are this. He also sticks around to watch because he is the Phantom, and gets satisfaction from sabotaging her performances.
- Sticky Business: Book of Shadows: When Vin's band messes up their performance because of their uncontrollable magic instruments, people come to watch their gigs just to see if more accidents would happen. The lead singer hates this reputation his band has just received.
Web Animation
- BIGTOP BURGER: Zomburger is a Lethal Eatery that deliberately makes poor-quality burgers in order to garner negative reviews, which in turn drives more customers to eat there just to see if the menu is as bad as they claim.
Frances: The worse the food, the better the sales!
- Zero Punctuation:
- Yahtzee genuinely recommends buying Ride to Hell: Retribution since it's so bad it has to be played to be believed.
"It's bad. It's explosively, apocalyptically bad, and you should totally buy it. I'm serious, you have to see this shit! Where to start?!"
- He also claims the only reason Daikatana was released on Steam was so people could see how bad it is, adding that the description should have been "roll up, roll up, everyone come and see the freak."
- Yahtzee genuinely recommends buying Ride to Hell: Retribution since it's so bad it has to be played to be believed.
Webcomics
- Tycho of Penny Arcade once bought a copy of Tony Hawk: Ride for $120 on the basis that the game is, in his own words, "fucking goddamn bullshit, even though it sucks," and later asking the store clerk if they have anything else horrible. (The comic's authors were mocking Tony Hawk's real-world assertion that Ride was getting bad reviews because everyone had made up their minds to hate the game before they even played it.)
- In El Goonish Shive, Elliot watches Jack and Jill because he was curious why it had a 4% approval rating.
Web Video
- In Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie, Linkara ultimately comes to an epiphany that despite all the crap he's gone through, the thing that gives him purpose in life is reviewing bad comics and learning about the creative decisions that led to them getting made.
- Minecraft SOS: Implied. Sausage writes an in-universe shippy Real-Person Fic of one of his friends based on one of his past series and performs it for a server-wide Talent Contest. Two of the three judges, Eloise and Katherine, keep their lights on for the playnote , but both end up giving Sausage extremely low scores, with Eloise outright saying that it "greatly disturbed" her.
Western Animation
- DuckTales (2017): In "Louie's Eleven!," Dewey is convinced yo-yo tricks are the next big thing and hopes to perform them for hit-maker Emma Glamour. When Glamour's party is overtaken by mercenaries, Dewey jumps at the chance to create a distraction. He's terrible and fails at even the simplest of tricks, but Glamour and the mercenaries can't pull their eyes away from the spectacle.
