Media you just can't get into or can't get into a second time around.

[Hagashager]

As the title says, What is a piece of media you have tried, earnestly to get into but just can't?

For me it's DUNE. I must've read the first 2/3rds of the first book about 4 times since 2008 and I just can't get past it. I think it's because Frank Herbert hams his various themes so heavily and with such a blunt, heavy hand that by the 132nd time Paul muses on the cruelty of Arrakis and Baron Harkonen I just get exhausted.

[Grey Watcher]

I don't know that I'd say I've tried super hard, but despite having seen 8 or 9 episodes and honestly enjoying them, I've never been able to get terribly excited about Doctor Who. All signs say I should be really into it, but I just never got any impulse to go out of my way to see more.

[Dire_Flumph]

The films of Bong Joon-ho. My friends love them, and it seems like they should be stuff I take to, but I've seen the Host, Snowpiercer and Okja and haven't liked a single one of his films. Parasite looks interesting, but I'm not sure it's worth trying at this point.

I'd also pick the Fire Emblem series in the games section. I love turn based tactics games, and there's nothing specific in how they play that I object to, but I've tried four games in the series now and can't muster the enthusiasm to finish one. And I'm usually a stickler for completing games I start.

I was also not a fan of Doctor Who at all for the longest time. I've warmed to it since, but the problem from my view is even though there are some absolutely fantastic episodes, it seems like I have to wade through a lot of bad to decent episodes to get there. I have a hard time mustering enthusiasm to watch a new season or continue catching up on the classic era.

[Zevox]

The main one that comes to mind for me is Guilty Gear. By all rights, I should love that series - I love basically every other fighting game made by ArcSystem Works, and it's the grandaddy of them all, and has all the same elements I love from their other games. But when I did try it with Guilty Gear Xrd, for some reason I just was not able to find a character that I really meshed with and enjoyed playing. I tried Ramlethal for a bit, but wound up more frustrated than anything trying to make her work. I could play Ky, but didn't really want to, as I'd burned out on his play style a while back playing Jin in BlazBlue. I kind of wanted to play May because she's so goofy, but she's a charge character, and I can't play those in a real match to save my life. And of the rest, I just couldn't find anybody that appealed to me and felt right when I tried to play them. Which is really weird since I usually have the opposite problem of too many characters that I want to play in other ArcSys games.

In a similar vein to what Grey Watcher said about Doctor Who, I could maybe add Star Trek for myself. I actually did watch all of The Next Generation, plus the one movie from it that I heard was good (First Contact), and enjoyed it on the whole, but it strangely left me with no desire to check out other Star Trek series. I don't know, maybe I just got more attached to the characters than the setting or something.

[Lord Raziere]

mainline comic books.

I've read Watchmen, Superman Red Son, some of Transmetropolitan and liked all of those, but when I try to read any of the main comics of any superhero, its always meh to me. like I read an entire deadpool omnibus and I like deadpool, but none of it felt......I dunno, I just didn't feel anything from it, it just didn't grab me. I like the idea of the superheroes but it seems whenever I grab a comic off the shelf its just not as good as I expect and I just can't get into it.

[Eldan]

Yeah, I can't get into serialized comics either. My friends usually try to hand me some issues of something, along with "come on, Batman is cool, and you don't need to know anything about the world to read this one" and then... characters show up that you're expected to know already without explanation, and everything ties into some other story you're never going to read, and nothing is properly resolved and just everything drags on forever.

And I'll agree on Star Trek. By all means, I should love it. I like both hard sci fi, soft sci fi and pure space opera. I like talky shows. I have a very high tolerance for slow pacing. I like Patrick Stewart. I like a lot of stuff that is in Star Trek. But whenever I try to watch the odd episode, it's just... not very good. Or not as good as I feel it should be, perhaps?

[halfeye]

TV.

It's cringe-making.

[Imbalance]

TV.

It's cringe-making.

Anymore, yeah. There was a time that I loved so many different shows, but now I'm left wondering: do they only make garbage now, or did I outgrow the medium?

I'm wholly averse to anything with zombies. I'm just tired of them. They've been into everything for more than a decade, and I had my fill long ago. There's nothing compelling, no new lore, and they've never really been scary.

[Psyren]

For me it's 90s and early 2000s comedy. Stuff like Friends, Family Guy, and Seinfeld that just did not age well, no matter how much I thought I enjoyed them at the time. Even Futurama is showing some scuff marks, thought not nearly as bad as the first three.

[Yora]

3 years ago I had an opportunity to start reading Hellsing. I think I read the first four or five books, but they really were not good.

I also read the first One Punch Man, which bored me.

Oh, and I guess you could say Disney Star Wars. I sat through three movies until I told my family to please stop buying tickets for me without asking.

[JoshL]

I'm usually not the type to spend much time thinking about things I don't like. That said, there are things that I really WANT to like, or feel like I should like, but just don't.

Adventure Time - fun fantasy cartoon that just sets my teeth on edge. I've tried a bunch of times, even had friends recommend episodes they thought I'd like. I just can't, and I'm not certain why. Even the ukelele theme makes me cringe a little.

Dresden Files - look, I love urban fantasy. Charles de Lint is easily one of my favorite writers ever. I liked the tv series by the end (the first few episodes were clunky at best, but it eventually found it's rhythm). I made it through the first three books. I've been told that the series gets better, and I've certainly read and enjoyed trashier (any given D&D novel, for example), but I have just not been compelled to get the next one. Or ever re-read them, which is very unusual for me.

The films of the Coen Brothers - with the exception of No Country For Old Men, every time I watch a Coen Brothers film, I am struck by how well done and downright brilliant the movie is....and I hate it. I often even like all the elements going into a Coen Brothers film. On paper, O Brother Where Art Thou should be my favorite film ever (as someone who obsessively digs traditional music and folklore, with more than a passing knowledge of the Odyssey). There are moments I like, but for the most part, they taught me that quality and taste are different things and I can dislike things that I think are brilliant (and love things I think are trash).

Depeche Mode - I love electronic music. I love synthpop. I love dark electronic music. I love passionate music with soulful singers. As a goth, DM is sort of required reading, and when Violator came out I LOVED the singles. Bought a few albums. Spent years thinking I was a fan, despite the fact that I only really liked a couple songs on each. Erasure is one of my favorite bands, DM had Vince Clarke to start with! Why aren't I the biggest DM fan ever? I still like a couple of their songs, but for the most part, I have accepted that I just don't like them. Mind you, when they inevitably drop in the goth club I'm dancing at, they won't chase me off the floor. But I won't coming running to the floor when I hear them either.

[Tyndmyr]

As the title says, What is a piece of media you have tried, earnestly to get into but just can't?

For me it's DUNE. I must've read the first 2/3rds of the first book about 4 times since 2008 and I just can't get past it. I think it's because Frank Herbert hams his various themes so heavily and with such a blunt, heavy hand that by the 132nd time Paul muses on the cruelty of Arrakis and Baron Harkonen I just get exhausted.

In fairness, Baron Harkonen is...not subtle with villany. I liked the original Dune(but feel like at this point, his progeny have mined the concept to death). Still, it's a fair criticism.

For me, it's the Dark Tower series. That first book just drags. I've tried like three times.

Dr Who, I got into for a bit, then fell back out of it. There are good episodes, and even good runs, but the show as a whole is highly inconsistent. Not even a flaw, really, it's just an acknowledged part of the show. Even the biggest fan would acknowledge good and bad episodes, I think.

[Pex]

Distopic sci-fi. With Dark Matter being the exception, every time I try I get bored or miserable and stop watching. I didn't get past 20 minutes watching the first episode of Firefly. Ditto The Expanse. New Star Trek, never after the first movie. Never touched Discovery. I'm not jumping to get CBS access for Picard. Speaking of Dark Matter, it was the loss of memory trope that I was interested in. It was no surprise to me that once they solved the mystery of the memory loss and just dealt with the distopia universe they built, i.e. the last season, I gradually lost interest and stopped watching. Negan made The Walking Dead not fun anymore. It's why I was hating on Flash with The Thinker season. They lose in every episode.

[druid91]

Oddly enough. Naruto. I can remember liking the show in High School. I recently tried to give it a re-watch and it's just..... Terrible.

[No brains]

Much as it pains me to say it, MST3K. I adore them for what they're trying to do, but the movies just suck too much! I can't stand them!

[Olinser]

How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones.

Great series that I loved when they were airing.

IMPOSSIBLE to go back and rewatch now because I know the black hole of an ending that awaits me. Ruins the entire show :smallfurious:

[Pex]

How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones.

Great series that I loved when they were airing.

IMPOSSIBLE to go back and rewatch now because I know the black hole of an ending that awaits me. Ruins the entire show :smallfurious:

Sadly, ditto. I can watch a Friends rerun easy peasy. Mother, no way. What the heck were they thinking? We wanted the sappy happy ending. It was appropriate to have the sappy happy ending. Not everything needs to be edgy or shocking. They ruined the show.

[Olinser]

Sadly, ditto. I can watch a Friends rerun easy peasy. Mother, no way. What the heck were they thinking? We wanted the sappy happy ending. It was appropriate to have the sappy happy ending. Not everything needs to be edgy or shocking. They ruined the show.

Sure but Friends was a different animal. Some of the plot threads that ran throughout some of the later season were pretty cancer, but at the end it stuck to it's core premise - 'Friends'.

How I Met Your Mother is literally the entire premise of the show. It's the single plot thread that runs through the entire show. They turned it into, "How I Met Your Mother And Then She Died Off Screen So I Could Bang Robin After Her Divorce". They invalidated years of character development for most of their main characters just because they wanted to stick to an ending they taped 8 years before.

[Manga Shoggoth]

A Game of Thrones (The book...) - a hugely annoying instance as the book should have hit every one of my buttons (well written, decently thought out world, interesting characters) but somehow failed to engage me at almost any level. I forced myself to read the first third or so of the book, then looked ahead to see Viserys get his comeuppance and put the book in the Charity Shop pile.

[Lemmy]

How I Met Your Mother and Game of Thrones.

Great series that I loved when they were airing.

IMPOSSIBLE to go back and rewatch now because I know the black hole of an ending that awaits me. Ruins the entire show :smallfurious:
Ah... Indeed. They are perfect examples of how a ****ty ending (or sequel) can be so awful it retroactively ruins the whole franchise.

GoT went from a series I wanted to recommend to everyone to something I absolutely despise and advise everyone to stay away from.

But, hey! Maybe we'll have a better ending in the books... By 2056. Written by someone using using notes GRRM left behind before dying.

[Ibrinar]

Get into hmm I don't really try stuff for long if I don't like it. There are some I tried to give a chance I suppose like I think I finished the first books for the the magicians and the black company. And I never got into TTGL despite giving it 9 episodes or so.

I also usually don't reread but there is one I liked quite a bit and have started rereading but never finished a second time, Tads Williams Osten Ard. The beginning is a bit slow if you already know it and 4 1000 page books are just a lot. I mean I have read much longer stuff but on a reread it is harder.

[DomaDoma]

I never got into TTGL despite giving it 9 episodes or so.

That's the exact amount of episodes needed to determine you'll never get into TTGL. Rock solid diagnosis.

(...I guess having an adult life, therefore, bars those who aren't in it for the fanservice from ever finding out for sure. Troubling design flaw.)

For me, Terry Pratchett. Everyone I love recommends him for reasons I should, on the face of it, like very much, but every time I actually try to read one of his books...

[Olinser]

Ah... Indeed. They are perfect examples of how a ****ty ending (or sequel) can be so awful it retroactively ruins the whole franchise.

GoT went from a series I wanted to recommend to everyone to something I absolutely despise and advise everyone to stay away from.

But, hey! Maybe we'll have a better ending in the books... By 2056. Written by someone using using notes GRRM left behind before dying.

Hey Brandon Sanderson did a respectable job with The Wheel of Time. Maybe he's available after GRRM finally kicks it?

[Bartmanhomer]

Judge Judy. I tried to watch a few episodes and she's very abusive as heck. So I stop watching her show.

[GrayDeath]

Dresden Files - look, I love urban fantasy. Charles de Lint is easily one of my favorite writers ever. I liked the tv series by the end (the first few episodes were clunky at best, but it eventually found it's rhythm). I made it through the first three books. I've been told that the series gets better, and I've certainly read and enjoyed trashier (any given D&D novel, for example), but I have just not been compelled to get the next one. Or ever re-read them, which is very unusual for me.


Well, onmce upon a time in the early 000s a friend lent me the first 2 books....and I simply found them horribly boring.

Didnt touch the series again until the time Small Favour came oue (2008(9?) when I found books 4 to 7 lying in a bin for misürints (the books switched the type of letters from regular to something like Arial in the middle, nothing else damaged).

And been a fan ever since.

My suggestion is: if a witty, mouthy main character in urban Fantasy is not something that puts you off altogether, to jsut get book 4 and read it. It will mayhap do the same thing as it did for me. :)

Afterwards I even got book 3 as there haüppen some things with HUGE implications for alter books, but even now being a fan I never found books 1 and 2 to be mroe than a proof of concept with little risk. ^^



As for the thread. for me its Rick and Morty.
Memeworthy. Some really mindboggling things, all stuff I should like, but the style and the progression really make me simply not enjoy it at all.

Also, Supergirl.

Could have been glorious. Was shallow "girly" stuff with incredibly stupid main characters (Barry Allen is no longer the Dumbest Man alive^^). Makes me sleepy every time its on though, so its very good to get to bed if I have to get up really early ^^

[Lemmy]

Pretty much any CW super-hero show other than Arrow (seasons 1 and 2) and Flash (season 1)... But that's because everything else they made ranges from slightly below mediocre to full-on cringe-worthy garbage.

[Dienekes]

Hey Brandon Sanderson did a respectable job with The Wheel of Time. Maybe he's available after GRRM finally kicks it?

Won't happen. Brandon has gone on record saying he believes that GRRM is a fantastic writer and gives a list of things he thinks GRRM does better than him, but always ends that he put down GoT and vowed not to read any of his other books because he was "too mean to his characters."

Anyway, for me it's anything by David Eddings. The Belgariad was a crucial part of my childhood, it's what got me into the fantasy genre in the first place. I can still remember the characters, their interactions, and how fun I thought it was. Then as an adult I picked up the first one again, read a few pages and just though "You know what? This isn't as good as I remember and I just don't want to tarnish something I hold so dear."

Things I just can't get into, honestly most serialized anime that's introduced to me. So far the only ones I've been able to sit through have been Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and Cowboy Bebop. Partially because my sense of humor and apparently Japan's sense of humor are rarely intertwined (no switching to a weird childish art style isn't funny, nor is ridiculous overreaction, nor is the strangely ubiquitous pervert character), but largely because of how annoying I find a lot of anime narrated. In almost every one I watch there's this cadence to action that I find absolutely annoying beyond belief.

Character does action. We see character do action. We switch to a different character who gawks at the action. Then we get an explanation for the action followed by more gawking.

Yes. I know. I saw it. You don't have to stop the action to explain it to me. Just let me watch.

Shut up Roshi. Shut up Krillin. Shut up everyone in Naruto. Shut up Genos. Just shut up!

[Chalkarts]

TV.

It's cringe-making.

I wish I could convince my wife of this.
She loves TV.
She watches it constantly. We DVR a lot of shows and invariably when I come home form work she often leads with, "Wanna watch something off the DVR tonight?"
My natural instinct is to say No, but in order to maintain a happiness I allow her to pick something.
She goes to sleep with the TV on, I don't go to sleep until it goes off an hour after she curls in. I no longer go to bed with her since I know I'll just lay awake wishing I could be thinking about anything else in the world than whatever drek is yammering away from the TV.

TV is mind-numbing.

[Raimun]

Media I've tried to get into but just can't ? When it comes to different media (books, movies, tv-shows, comics, games, etc.), I would say... almost none.

Whenever I'm looking for new books, movies, comics, games, tv-shows or whatever, or thinking about trying a new one, I usually have done some research and read and/or heard about it or I will actively do so if I haven't. I like to think I have a surprisingly broad range when it comes to the type of fictional stories I enjoy and I'm willing to cut new stuff a lot of slack. While I'm very keen to try new things, I'm also good at guessing if a given work is something I'd enjoy, just based on creators, plot and setting synopsis, reviews (a real review, written with thought behind it, any numerical score is ultimately meaningless) and metaknowledge like that. Of course, I might, on a whim, watch a film that was lying around near me but that is not a huge investment of time. And that is why I do research: time. There's only a limited amount of time and I'd rather try something good. Heck, I even find the research process more enjoyable than watching, reading or playing something I find dull or of low quality.

So, if I'm reading, watching or playing something, there is a very good chance I end up liking it or at least find something worth my while and I'm able to finish it.

However, if something were to be so uninteresting that I'm unable to wade through it, I would just drop it and never look back. Nothing immediately comes to mind because I've practiced the above "research first"-approach for at least a decade and a half.
Don't tell anyone but the only thing that leaps to mind is this literature course where the objective was to read well over a handful of different novels and write and present reviews about them. I may or may not have dismissed one of the assigned books, a stereotypical bulk romance novel, just after a couple dozen pages but still written (a still accurate) review that criticized its unoriginality. Of course, I didn't exactly choose to read that book and I would never have on my own and I have no interest to revisit it.

I guess Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones might, kind of, count. I remember when people hyped the books before the tv-show. People have hyped the tv-show. Friends, acquaintances and stragers talk about it a lot. I've played the Game of Thrones-strategy board game more times than many actual fans. I'm generally interested of it because enjoy fantasy as a setting in general, ranging from idealist high fantasy to dark and gritty fantasy. I also like history and enjoy when fictional settings have its own fictional history. I already know quite a bit about this fictional world via osmosis, especially when it comes to the grand scale.
However, I've never felt an actual, strong desire to start reading the books or even watching the tv-show and I've never even attempted either. I don't know, I guess as a whole, SoI&F/GoT doesn't really catch my interest?
Idealist (D&D-style) high fantasy is interesting precisely because it's so different from Real World Issues And Stuff(tm).
Dark and gritty fantasy is more interesting when it's about, I dunno, traveling swordsmen on desperate adventures and fighting a more realistic and scary take on monsters. Witcher-short stories or Conan-esque stories are a good example.
When it comes to stories about war in a fantasy world, I prefer that they are about warrior-generals and warlords who really wage war and not about glorified corrupt politicians and poisonous schemers who have way more in common with Grima Wormtongue than with Aragorn. No wonder I've always liked to play miniature games.
tl;dr: I've thought it would be neat to know more about SoI&F/GoT because it's such a common topic but I don't feel like committing the time to read or watch it because the setting doesn't really catch my personal interest.

[Kitten Champion]

Getting into, A Song of Ice and Fire. Read to the fourth book, just felt way too oppressive. It's also got that Soap Opera style of writing where they push characters to the top of the pile only to pull the Jenga bricks in on them for the tragedy/irony... and then repeat the process. Which made it fairly predictable to me despite all the "it's not like all those books with plot shield'ed characters" or "it's gritty and realistic" and so on. Plus I guess I don't like gritty depictions of people in pain and misery all that much.

As to getting back into something, probably Gundam Seed. I enjoyed Gundam Seed when it first aired, I think it's still watchable if significantly flawed in several areas -- well, the HD remake is, the original SD version is visually unattractive by today's standard. The mech action's generally quite fun and the BGM's awesome, most of the first half is competently done story-wise as well.

Once Seed Destiny hit however, it just evaporated my tolerance for the Cosmic Era flaws as an AU. The already moustache twirling puppy-kicking Earth Alliance became even more one-dimensional evilly evil, the ZAFT people are yet again harbouring secret villainous plans of villainy in what often feels like an inept measure by the writer to balance the moral scales between their side and literal genocidal monsters, and they even went to the trouble of introducing a new protagonist just to deprive him of any real character arc and instead turn him into a straight puppet to the main-ish villain and hand back the reigns of the series to the original Seed protagonist. Who, naturally, ascended to even further heights of Mary Sue-dom as the unstoppable Saviour of the Universe beating whole armies almost single-handedly.

After that, trying to see any nuance in the setting became exceedingly difficult. It became clear that it's just a sandbox for the power-fantasy MC to romp about in. Most of what I liked about Seed is just the stuff they took from Mobile Suit Gundam, while everything they added to the universe ranges from meh to eye-rolling.

What's worse, in retrospect, they did a very similar main character in Turn A Gundam that preceded it - a young pacifist who wants to protect the lives of both sides of a conflict that he's forced to participate in - but it was just so much better at accomplishing that. Both sides could be sympathized with such that the sense of tragedy of the war between them was pretty well realized, and the main character really had to struggle in both his moral choices and fights which gave him a great deal more pathos especially when he failed.

[Strigon]

I was also not a fan of Doctor Who at all for the longest time. I've warmed to it since, but the problem from my view is even though there are some absolutely fantastic episodes, it seems like I have to wade through a lot of bad to decent episodes to get there. I have a hard time mustering enthusiasm to watch a new season or continue catching up on the classic era.

Oh, very much this.
For quite a while, if you had asked me if I were a Doctor Who fan, I would have enthusiastically said yes. Whenever a new series came out, though, I'd ignore it for months until I was completely starved for something to watch.
A bad episode might have a few good moments, but by and large, the show is only as good as their idea for an episode. And ideas that I find intriguing enough to get excited about are scarce, indeed.


Dresden Files - look, I love urban fantasy. Charles de Lint is easily one of my favorite writers ever. I liked the tv series by the end (the first few episodes were clunky at best, but it eventually found it's rhythm). I made it through the first three books. I've been told that the series gets better, and I've certainly read and enjoyed trashier (any given D&D novel, for example), but I have just not been compelled to get the next one. Or ever re-read them, which is very unusual for me.


To be fair, the series changes drastically. It's sort of like one of those serial TV shows that starts out in a set of weekly unrelated events, then switches to a more coherent narrative a few weeks in. Except in my experience, the shows usually get worse after that point, whereas Dresden improves.
It has gotten to the point where I kind of wish Jim Butcher would rewrite the first five or so books to get the main plot underway sooner. I keep telling my friends how great the series is, but I realize halfway through talking about his earlier works that I'm really a fan of, like, the latter 50%.

Anyway, Dark Souls was that for me. I like RPGs, I like tactical, responsive combat, I enjoy a challenge, I should like the game. The combat just feels anemic to me, though, like my character suffers extreme arthritis and can't muster enough strength to do more than lightly tap their opponent. Something about the aesthetic also makes me feel like the world is incredibly empty and shallow, despite the fact I know it has reasonably well-developed lore.

Also, Skyrim. There's a ton of content there, but none of it feels meaningfully different. Every class of enemy feels basically the same, except for some standouts like giants and dragons. Combat feels the same whether I'm a heavy weapons orc fighting a group of chaurus, or a lightly armoured redguard fighting bandits, or a sneaky rogue fighting vampires, or a high elf wizard fighting draugr.
The combat just fails to grip me, and it's obvious that, as much as they've crammed in other content into the game, it's fundamentally a game about fighting your way through dungeons.
I enjoyed my first playthrough, until eventually getting bored (not because I didn't like the game, but because I'd played it for about five hours a day for months), but I've never been able to get invested since.

[Hagashager]

Getting into, A Song of Ice and Fire. Read to the fourth book, just felt way too oppressive. It's also got that Soap Opera style of writing where they push characters to the top of the pile only to push the Jenga bricks on them for the tragedy/irony... and then repeat then process. Which made it fairly predictable to me despite all the "it's not like all those books with plot shield'ed characters" or "it's gritty and realistic" and so on. Plus I guess I don't like gritty depictions of people in pain and misery all that much.



Yes, I agree. I decided to start ASoI&F because GRRM is apparently a massive fan of another author I adore.

His stories are good for a while but some of it leans very far into Terry Goodkind territory. I cannot stand that kind of intense, insane cruelty mixed with graphic violence. I loved it as a teen but now I find it trashy and mean-spirited.

[Yora]

Also, Skyrim. There's a ton of content there, but none of it feels meaningfully different. Every class of enemy feels basically the same, except for some standouts like giants and dragons. Combat feels the same whether I'm a heavy weapons orc fighting a group of chaurus, or a lightly armoured redguard fighting bandits, or a sneaky rogue fighting vampires, or a high elf wizard fighting draugr.
The combat just fails to grip me, and it's obvious that, as much as they've crammed in other content into the game, it's fundamentally a game about fighting your way through dungeons.

I think Bethesda RPGs are in general really quite bad. Morrowind has an amazing setting, but the gameplay is just as bad as in all the other games. But the other games don't even have that.
Skyrim is pretty, which gives it a certain charm. But the gameplay is still bad. I think I have some 100 hours in that game, but that is stretched out over 8 years. I finally made it through the two main quests lines a few weeks ago and they are really laughably bad. I think on my last run I was also listening to audiobooks almost the entire time.

[Razade]

Won't happen. Brandon has gone on record saying he believes that GRRM is a fantastic writer and gives a list of things he thinks GRRM does better than him, but always ends that he put down GoT and vowed not to read any of his other books because he was "too mean to his characters."

This is one of the many reasons I can't get into Sanderson. So I guess put this one down for me. I love fantasy novels, even not great ones, and by all merits people seem to adore Sanderson. I've had friends and family members suggest I start any number of his series and I've tried a few and...he just doesn't click with me. His world building, as someone who loves world building, just seems uninspired and joyless. The worlds don't feel alive and for how well crafted the "magic" systems of his work are put together it all seems complex for the same of sounding really cool and innovative when half a dozen far worse anime have done more or less the same thing he's doing.

I'm also for really long books but I feel at some point he's just trying a bit to hard to cram stuff in that really didn't need to be there. If you're going to make 10 books each a thousand pages make them all fun to read. I don't need another boring lecture on how the wind moving factors into how you're wiggling your fingers for magic.

Rick and Morty is another. I'm all for subversive comedy with some intelligence. I think this one has more to do with its fanbase who want to declare it the best thing ever when it's maybe 10 years too late to be considered anything but derivative of other material.

[Azuresun]

Oddly enough. Naruto. I can remember liking the show in High School. I recently tried to give it a re-watch and it's just..... Terrible.

For me, Bleach was much the same thing. It was my first shonen battle manga, and it really blew my mind with these epic and visceral battles. As time went on, the cracks really started to show--weak characterisation, power level bloat, interesting characters getting sidelined, Ichigo losing his fun and likeable personality, and an increasing sense that it was style over substance with no long-term planning. I have fond memories of everything before Hueco Mundo, but after seeing more modern series that do the same thing better, I don't think I could go back.

I dropped out of Game of Thrones shortly into season 4. It felt like at that point, they were going out of their way to establish that everyone in this world was just awful and you should be rooting for the Night King--you know how a big chunk of season 3 was fleshing out the wildlings as being this developed culture and not just a mob of savage barbarians? Here's this other group of wildlings who are rapey edgelord cannibals!

In general, I'm pretty much disinterested with the love affair that 21st century TV has been having with grimdark. At this point, it feels like some absurd race to the bottom--our main character is a drug dealer! Yeah, well ours is a serial killer!

[halfeye]

In general, I'm pretty much disinterested with the love affair that 21st century TV has been having with grimdark.

There has been grimdark on the TV for a very long time. The limits on nudity and violence may have shifted slightly, but they aren't really needed for the dark.

These are British and from the 1960s, but I'd be surprised if the USA had nothing like them:

Spindoe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindoe), Big Breadwinnner Hog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Breadwinner_Hog), Callan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_(TV_series)).

[DomaDoma]

It will surprise no one that I completely adore Stormlight Archive. And the worldbuilding definitely is part of it - figuring out things like Wit and the Stormfather is like a third of the fun!

But I don't love the broader sociopolitical world, or the magic system. That really is needlessly complicated.

[Rodin]

Distopic sci-fi. With Dark Matter being the exception, every time I try I get bored or miserable and stop watching. I didn't get past 20 minutes watching the first episode of Firefly. Ditto The Expanse. New Star Trek, never after the first movie. Never touched Discovery. I'm not jumping to get CBS access for Picard. Speaking of Dark Matter, it was the loss of memory trope that I was interested in. It was no surprise to me that once they solved the mystery of the memory loss and just dealt with the distopia universe they built, i.e. the last season, I gradually lost interest and stopped watching. Negan made The Walking Dead not fun anymore. It's why I was hating on Flash with The Thinker season. They lose in every episode.

I don't think Firefly counts as dystopic. The roots are Western, mixed with a bit of Heist. Things seem a bit harsh because we're viewing things from the bottom rung of society, but people in general are shown to be doing okay. Our heroes have bad run-ins with the authorities because they are criminals, and the Alliance officials we see are genuinely trying to keep the peace in a lawless region of space.

And yes, there are evil higher-ups in the Alliance that are major villains in the series. They also work in the shadows because what they are doing is very illegal.

For that matter, I don't think nuTrek or Discovery count either. Dystopia is a very specific definition, and at no point can the Federation be accused of that.

[Kitten Champion]

For that matter, I don't think nuTrek or Discovery count either. Dystopia is a very specific definition, and at no point can the Federation be accused of that.

Yeah, it would be a considerable stretch to call any of the recent Trek dystopic. I'd call the movies at least... heightened. Certainly in terms of characterizations in its interpretation of the TOS crew and the often frantic way they're shot, but specifically the way stakes are almost always set as high as they can conceivably go every time.

So it does seems more much apocalyptic than old Trek. Though it's not even close to Dark Matter in terms of cynicism.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I guess I'll participate. Media which I would count for this would be things I feel I've tried out a significant amount, yet haven't had much interest in. So things like watching 1 or 2 episodes of a show or playing a game for an hour or so only doesn't count in my mind (Doctor Who, Firefly, Terminator TV show, various Bioware games). Sometimes it doesn't take very long at all to realize that a piece of media is Not For Me. Mostly, I try to avoid media if I expect to not care about them. (Marvel movies, Star Wars) These are all things I feel I have given a better shot at than all the things I just mentioned.

Okay, here we go. Game of Thrones. Years ago I had a friend who showed me the show's first season when I would go hang out with him. It didn't engage me much. Probably doesn't help that I only really liked watching a couple of the many characters and kept wanting to have the plot be about something it was never going to be about. The same friend showed me several seasons of Dexter too, and I liked that one, but never resumed watching it once that friend had caught me up on what had been released so far.

Adventure Time. By all rights, it's something I should like, as its style of humor is seemingly similar to mine. It just never clicked. Maybe the art style was a bit too cartoony so it never felt like anything was really grounded at all. Jake's seemingly arbitrary, weird powers mostly just confused me whenever they were shown.

Rick and Morty. I didn't find any of the characters likeable. Not liking any of the characters presented doesn't always mean I won't get into it, but the jokes seemed to mostly be edgelord type material.

One Punch Man. It's got an interesting set up and some engaging characters and ideas, but there's just something about the anticlimactic action sequences it constantly wants to show that makes me feel the joke is overused. It's like they were proud of the one gag and wanted to keep doing it over and over, not realizing that it loses impact every time it gets repeated.

Open-world inventory-management RPG games. (Bethesda style games. But not necessarily limited to that one company.) Something about the design of this type of game just doesn't appeal to me. The world doesn't draw my attention enough to care what I'm actually supposed to be doing, so I just tend to wander around randomly looking at stuff and collecting semi-valuable objects until I get bored enough to quit.

Hayao Miyazaki films. Maybe this is just a byproduct of not really getting into anime in general.

[GentlemanVoodoo]

The ones that stick out the most:

Dr. Who: Tried to get into the show but like some have said, a few great episodes and to many bad ones.

Family Guy/The Simpsons/American Dad: Lumping these together since it is mostly the same plot and set up for the shows with only a few differences. Many of the gags are over played and old.

Rick and Morty: Don't get the point and find nothing funny about it.

Law and Order: In their first few seasons they had some interesting plots but again the same old drull repeated over and over. SVU is the most guilty of this. I will say Criminal Intent was interesting but that was only due to the chemistry that Kathryn Erbe and Vincent D' Onofrio had together.

South Park: In it's hay-day, the show was great. But in the days of youtube and other social media that parody current events, it feels and looks outdated.

Star Trek Discovery: After the first episode my only thought was "WTF is this crap?" All I have to say on it.

Game of Thrones: Stopped watching after the 3rd season as I got bored with it. Started to pick it up again and couldn't finish past season 5.

[Velaryon]

Where to start? If I did one post about each thing, I could probably fill this entire thread to 50 pages myself. But I'll just throw out a few for now.

1. Dragonlance, both as a book series and as a D&D setting. I think I would have enjoyed the books more if I had discovered them at a younger age. But as an adult, I find Raistlin (and somewhat Caramon,by extension) interesting, but nothing else. Tasslehoff is amusing for awhile, but his schtick wears thin pretty quick, all the other characters are forgettable to me. The world feels painfully generic, and like there isn't much narrative room to even use it as a campaign setting. I found Lord Soth interesting when he was lifted out of this setting and plunked into Ravenloft, though.

2. Rick and Morty. I'm just gonna say it - this show is bad. It's not clever, no matter how much it thinks it is. The characters are obnoxious, the art style is horrendous, and it has THE worst fan base in the world, bar none. Yes, worse than Star Wars fans.

3. Adventure Time. I think cartoons should look better than something drawn by a 4 year-old.

4. Long anime series like Bleach, or One Piece. Just the thought of trying to get into a series with hundreds upon hundreds of episodes like that is exhausting to me. I don't think I could manage it even if I didn't have a job, other interests, etc.

5. The Dark Souls games. I could just say "I'm not a masochist" and leave it at that, but frankly I think that a) if it's possible to get stuck for multiple hours on the tutorial boss, you're doing something wrong as a game designer. And in the few hours I spent with the game, I felt the challenge came less from interesting game mechanics than from clunky controls. I felt like my character was moving through molasses the whole time.