I've seen a lot of Avril hate recently and I don't fully understand it. I am taking this long rant from Reddit, but I feel like it makes a lot of great points:
Today, it's due to the Brazil meet and greeters being told not to touch her. This is because she was assaulted when in Brazil last, and is responding irrationally. This is atypical behavior for Avril.
Before this last tour, Avril was always very gracious in her meet and greets. A few friends of mine gave her some t shirts on a few occasions, and she even wore them. She is always willing to give time to fans. Here's a picture of one of these times, and this was just during the tour before this one.
i.imgur.com/nERxB.jpgNote the smile and contact.
It's clear that Avril feels every bit as awkward about this as the people with whom she is taking pictures.
However, this does not cover the continued hatred of her over time by this website.
I wrote an extensive response to a similar question in ELI5, but I will reproduce it here, in an attempt to give context to the hatred of her. The question was about why everyone hated the Hello Kitty music video.
Avril has had a lot of vitriol thrown toward her over the years for peoples' perceptions of what she's doing, and less about what she is actually doing.
In her early days, and still today, to a lesser extent, Avril got a lot of shit for trying to be punk even though she clearly wasn't. Avril denied her punk intentions then and she does now. She made singer/songwriter dumb pop on her first two albums. She also got shit for knowing little about rock history. This, however, can be forgiven. She was picked up as a country singer who, upon recording many pop country songs, both self written and co written, including Breakaway, which Kelly Clarkson later did, decided she wanted to go a more Alanis route upon hearing many different types of music. She once mispronounced David Bowie's name, which people give her shit for as well.
By the second album, she got shit for being too whiny and boring, where most of her songs were midtempo numbers. Also, during this time, Avril got to drinking a lot and would perform very poorly live. Due to Avril's whiny simplistic songs and bad performances, she got shit.
In 2005 Avril went blonde, started singing much better, and moved into more grown up clothes, photoshoots, and jobs, including acting. See her in The Flock and Over The Hedge. She got shit here from people seeing her as a sell out because she didn't dress like a tomboy any longer and she died her hair.
Around this time, Avril started to get hit with claims about authorship of her music, with Skye Sweetnam mentioning that The Matrix (or Dr. Luke, I forget. I'll find a source for this)said she didn't do anything on the songs she cowrote, which they denied, and Chantal Krevaziuk(?), a Canadian sin ger and former song coauthor, also claiming Avril stole some of her songs for her to be released album, which she of course, later recanted, as it was patently false, though a title was similar. Avril's detractors shit on her for this, and explained away the denials as more evidence of some kind of grand Avril Lavigne conspiracy.
In 2007, Avril released a new album which had her biggest hit song yet, Girlfriend. It was her first MV she danced on, and she hired backup dancers and singers, most notable Sofi and Lindsey, known affectionately as Sofa and Loveseat. While this album was the rockiest one yet, her choice of singles, Girlfriend, When You're Gone, Hot, and The Best Damn Thing, were less guitar and pop rock styled than the rest of the album. They were also wildly immature for a 22-23 year old woman, or so her critics said, and she wrote more mature songs previously. This is true for a few of those songs. When You're Gone was quite mature, and so were many of the other songs on the album. Avril made a choice here for live shows, as she has stated. She wanted to make her live shows more fun and lively, so she made more fun and lively singles.
Avril's next album was long delayed, and long troubled. She was pressured strongly by her record label to record more poppy bullshit like Girlfriend, but, at this point, Avril had just gone through a divorce and was feeling depressed. She didn't like the singles they picked for the album, and there were no major hits from the record. This time, Avril got shit for not having a hit single on a deeply personal depressing album. Before, she was talentless for not doing anything serious or not commercial. Now, she's shit for having little commercial success. Despite this, Avril won numerous awards in Asia and toured there extensively, even forgoing an American leg of the tour to do more in Asia, in particular, Japan.
Avril moved to a new record label for her self titled album, and it seems like she threw spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck, trying to find a new sound after the last exhausting album, and she has said similar things in interviews. Her first single performed well, and was self referential about Avril's immaturity. The second didn't chart in most of the world, but hit #1 in south Korea and #5 in Japan, and was similar to the first song. The third was with Chad Kroeger, Avril's new husband, and she got shit for that one from Nickelback proximity hate. This song is a power ballad, wildly different from the previous two songs' midtempo pop/rock. The next single, Hello Kitty, is a techno pop song with a dubstep drop in it. Avril stated, half jokingly, that it's about pussy, but also has stated it's a love letter to Japan, a country that has been good to her for a long time (see her Live in Budokan DVD from 05, and the fact that she did a promo tour for this album in Asia only). To get a hint of the kind of variety Avril put on here, a run up to Hello Kitty on the album includes "17", a retrospective song about fooling around at that age, "Bitchin' Summer" a song about being out of school early where she raps for the first time for real since 2002 (disregarding the Lil Mama Girlfriend remix), the aforementioned third single, "Let Me Go," "Give You What You Like," a slow tempo, sad but shameless love song about a one night stand, and "Bad Girl," a song explicitly about the act of sex, and a duet with Marilyn Manson. It's a pretty hard rocker for a pop/rock artist. Then it goes into Hello Kitty.
The music video was thought up by a Japanese guy and was filmed in Japan by Japanese people. Despite this, due to its fetishization of some aspects of the Japanese culture, people have claimed that it's racist. Those who don't criticize her Skrillex hair she's had for a while now. Those who don't do that say that Avril is just trying to jump on a bandwagon that other artists have done before with their Japanese centric music videos/songs. Those who don't do that fall back on the old, now over a decade old, criticisms of Avril not being punk. Avril has always been pop. And, sometimes she puts out really shitty songs. This is one of them, and is absolutely worse than all of her other singles from a lyrical and structural standpoint, but this was meant to be more like that selfie song: played in a club, and danced to, PLUS be a nice thank you to Japan for sticking with her when other countries like the US have moved on.
I've given you a long history in people shitting on Avril Lavigne so you can see it from my perspective. Avril Lavigne is constantly getting shit for being a dumb pop/rock act posing as something better when she has never claimed to be anything but a dumb pop/rock act, in addition to a whole bunch of other relatively unrelated insults about her. This is the kind of framework with which you can look at the reasons people don't like this song in particular.
Remember that people are always trying to shitting on Avril, and this song is just the newest one with more interesting reasons than the other ones.
Full disclosure: I am a big time Avril Lavigne fan, so I am biased, but I'm honest. I play many instruments, like "good" music as well as Avril, and like to think I'm objective. By the way, if you want citations for anything I said, I can provide them, but not now, since I'm on my tablet. I know this is ELI5, but I would tell the same thing to my nephew, so I think the length and detail is warranted.
