Broken Base/Other Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


If it exists, it likely has had a Broken Base at one point or another.

  • Mac vs. PC. Enough said.
    • Too much said.
  • Porsche cars. Every single time a new model line is introduced it divides the owners/fan base. This happened when the Cayenne SUV came out, before that it was old school air-cooled 911 fans incensed at the new water-cooled 911, universally the 911 fans are putting down anything not-911 and getting a similar treatment from non-911 fans, and way back in the sixties there was the now familiar cry of "It's not a real Porsche!" when Porsche made their first major model change, introducing the 911 to replace the 356 model.
    • Car companies can fall victim to this. General Motors is a very good example, being essentially the automotive equivalent of Sonic the Hedgehog. Pontiac's dead? Good riddance, or Ruined FOREVER? Cadillac having front-wheel-drive cars? Acceptable or not?
  • AK-47 vs. M-16 for assault rifle people. The youtube videos have huge numbers of comments, and that's just the beginning.
    • To ~93% percent of the participants on both sides, the AK-74 is just an academic term, and the AK-100 series doesn't even exist. To the AK side, the M-16 never got upgraded, or cleaning kits, or any sort of improvement at all. To the M-16 side, the AK is so innacurate that the safest place to be when it is fired is directly in front of the muzzle, and they refuse to even touch Kalashnikovs, or even discuss the fact that certain members of the AK-100 family come in the same caliber as their beloved M-16's. Then the AK fanbase assumes that an M-16 will always jam, no matter what, and that the small caliber rounds can only kill you if you are shot 10 times, or if you bleed out on the ground for a couple minutes, and wooe betide you should you either take a third option or say that you like both. However, depending on the setting, your mileage may vary significantly.
    • Even more vicious is the infighting between diferent members and factions of each camp. The M-16 people argue over mods and manufacturers. The AK people go on over the 74's 5.45X39 round vs. the old 7.62 and whether or not it was a good idea.
      • Nowadays this have eased somewhat, with AK's availability in almost any caliber imagined. People still argue which one is better, though.
      • Don't forget country of manufacture (particularly the cheaper ones like Romanians are very divisive), importer, chromed vs non-chromed, and stamped vs. milled.
  • In handguns, there's the debates about revolvers versus pistols. The revolver camp goes on about the low caliber ammunition used by pistols and how unreliable they are. The pistol camp goes on about how revolvers are antiquated and that magnum catriges are just silly.
    • Don't even get started on the M9 vs. M1911 debate, or for that matter, any sort of debate about which makes a better bullet: a small, fast cartidge that tumbles through flesh, or a big heavy slug that wrecks whatever it hits.
    • Any brand of pistol vs. another brand of pistol. One common example (involving the two biggest selling types of firearms) is Glock "Safe Action" vs 1911-style "cocked and locked" carry.
  • Fans of all things zombie have a broken base over whether or not Romero-style zombies can successfully over take the real world. One group of fans says yes, and it would happen fast. Another group says it can happen but nowhere near as fast as it's depicted in movies/literature, etc... Basically it'll be like a slow burn. The last group says a zombie plague won't end the world because everyone and they momma knows what a zombie is and how to dispose of it. And that the government won't just collapse within a matter of months like it's usually depicted. At the most the zombie plague would just be a recurring health problem like Cancer and Aids.
  • Expo goers are in two camps: those that hate Caramelldansen and Hare Hare Yukai, and those who wish the fandom would stop posting threads about it on the boards.
  • What should be considered Porn or "nude/erotic art"... or both. If there's a line, where should the distinction be drawn? Keep in mind erotic art can be very pornographic as well. In fact the line is so blurred some think there isn't a difference anymore.
    • There's actually a website that lets you be the judge regarding some of the pictures they show you.
  • Video game magazines aren't safe from this either. Nintendo Power gets the most flack since many anti Nintendo fans always claim that the magazine is "biased" towards its own first party games by giving it high scores. When Nintendo Power was outsourced to another publisher, the staff slightly changed. People still claim Nintendo Power is biased, but will somehow agree with them if the magazine gives any game an 8 or less. Then of course you have people who think the reviews are just fine and get into a Flame War against those who bash the magazine.
  • The whole trope was rather beautifully summed up in an advertising tagline for Glenn Beck's show on the Fox News Channel.

"Love him, or hate him, you just can't miss him."

  • User-friendly Linux distributions such as Ubuntu vs. "power" distros such as Gentoo or Slackware.
    • Ubuntu itself causes a bit of a broken base for the Debian crowd: should Debian be credited more or would that tarnish Debian's reputation as rock solid? And then there's Canonical's recent UI antics, like rearranging buttons on the title bar or nuking the system tray notification area(the fact that they give the latter drifting from Microsoft's original vision as one of their reasons doesn't help).
    • And then there's the the debate over whether GNU's insistence on "GNU/Linux" is mere egotism or justified. The rise of Android, a Linux-based operating system using no GNU software, lent credence to the use of "GNU/Linux" to distinguish it from Android.
  • The Great Editor War, a long and epic battle between the users of Emacs and Vi. The battle between these two programming editors has gone on longer than the Mac vs. PC debate. The rivalry has long been joked about: even the normally bitter Richard Stallman has poked fun at the debate, declaring himself head of the "Church of Emacs" declaring war on the "Cult of Vi."
  • Napoleon lost a lot of admirers when he crowned himself Emperor, while also gaining new ones who had felt threatened by the prospect of democracy in France - making this trope, at least, Older Than Radio.
  • A Fanwork Ban can sometimes start one of these, among fans who support the author's decision, fans who lambast the author and/or defy the ban, and fans who leave the fandom entirely over the author's decision.
  • Hero Factory vs Bionicle, since the former is a replacement for the latter.
    • As far as their basic story concepts and plotlines go, at least. The Hero Factory sets seem to have been received well enough, especially the 2.0 figures.
    • And, oh, on a larger scale, there is the pro-Bionicle/Hero Factory and anti-Bionicle/Hero Factory "debate". Certain older members of the LEGO community seem to utterly hate these essentially action figure lines (and sometimes the people that like them as well), while their fans just want to be left alone to enjoy what they like.
  • High schools in the Maitland area of NSW, you either like Grossmann or Maitland high, god help you if you attend All saint's or Rutherford high.
  • There's also the infamous communists. There's the Marxists, the Marxist-Lenninists (who are usually just Trotskyists in disguise), the Trotskyists, the Stalinists, the Maoists and the Socio-democrats. Talk about broken fanbase.
    • Amendments are necessary. 'Social Democracy' is a center-left ideology and not connected to Communism, any more than socialism is. Communism is not exclusively Marxist and neither are all left-leaning ideologies Communist. Also, the above mentioned groups are all breakaways from Marxism-Leninism, in that they all accept Marx, Engels and Lenin to have created the foundation for their ideologies. So, yes, broken fanbase, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
  • Adult Swim: Anime vs Comedy. And within the comedy fanbase, Animated vs. Live-Action...as well as Original Programming vs. Syndicated/Imported.
  • Among photographers there is the debate about whether Canon or Nikon cameras are the absolute best.
  • The recent hacks to the Steam Database caused quite an uproar. Not because of a lack of security, but because people did NOT overreact as they did with the infamous Sony Hack: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2226449
  • Peanuts vs. Calvin and Hobbes. Which is very ironic, considering that Charles Schulz is one of Bill Watterson's main influences.
  • Android vs IOS. That is all.[context?]
    • Android itself is a Broken Base many times over due to it running on so many phones,many with devoted fans.
  • Talking about certain contestants on The Price Is Right that make bids that just says "I'm only making this bid to get attention", such as making a $2,000,000 bid, bids that are $420, or any bid whose last two numbers are 69. Fans of the show can't seem to decide whether or not the silly bids doesn't do anyone any harm or if it robs other people a spot on contestant's row because the idiot contestant wanted to get attention to themselves and not play the game seriously.
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