Ever stop watching something because it became too something?

[Trude]

I gave up on Gotham because it drifted away from what made it's first half so good. I really enjoyed the encapsulated nature of the episodes in that they were about a single recognizable villain in the style of Law and Order. When they started chasing a single plot thread for more than three episodes, it was so jarring from earlier episodes that it felt like a completely different show.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

I stopped reading Berserk because it didn?t seem like the story was progressing as much as it should (especially with the repeated hiatuses), Miura kept adding minor kid characters like Isidro and Schierke that I just didn?t care about or seemed to lack a definite purpose in the narrative, and the genre seemed to switch from a dark fantasy about morality and camaraderie to a somewhat by-the-numbers, RPG-like story.
I also got fed up of all the rape-for-drama and Casca still not being Casca anymore.

I stopped reading Ranma ½ once it became too much of an episodic harem melodrama and that ***** who?s meant to be Ranma?s love interest kept on being a ***** for no good reason. She just devolved into a typical tsundere who was arguably even more immature than the protagonist.

I stopped reading Trigun Maximum because I just could not follow the story due to the crazy, overly-detailed art, to the point that I barely had a clue what was happening anymore and figured, ?Well, I?ve watched the anime and, even though it diverges from the manga, it?s enough to get the gist of it.?

I stopped watching How I Met Your Mother due to the bullshit ?will-they-won?t-they? subplot with Ted and Robin, not to mention that they kept on stringing out the plot thread of who the actual ?Mother? was and, from what I hear, fucking it completely by the ending.

I stopped watching SpongeBob SquarePants when I realized that a lot of the jokes were either ?Mr. Krabs likes money? or ?Squidward getting repeatedly abused by everyone in Bikini Bottom because he?s a bit of a snob?. I think the people that complain about the series? downfall after the feature-length film were probably right, because it didn?t seem so much like that at the beginning, and SpongeBob used to be actually endearing. But now, for some reason?he just annoys me.

 

[Kyrian007]

Yup, A Game of Thrones. Got too boring. Not because it's a boring series, A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the better series of books I've ever read. It's just...

Well here's how it went. I didn't see the premiere. But I had a chance to watch a couple of the next few episodes. Missing the premiere didn't bother me, because I knew the series. I wasn't really missing anything. But as the series progressed, and it stayed "true to the books" (somehow a plus in the eyes of fanboys) I realized I was missing more and more episodes and not really caring. I still didn't feel like I was "missing anything." And then it hit me... to me, someone who has read and re-read the books for a decade... A Game of Thrones was boring. I didn't really care to watch it. Maybe if they pass the books chronologically, but otherwise... too boring. I always know what's going to happen so I don't see the point.

I guess I just don't get the fanboy mentality. Tv series based on books "The Dresden Files" and "Legend of the Seeker" were FAAAARRRRRRR superior in my estimation, BECAUSE they weren't chained to the series plots and were free to actually WRITE scripts as opposed to simply ADAPTING them. To me, MORE and NEW content is better than REHASHED and OLD content.

 

[Hades]

I'm not so keen on South Park anymore. These days the episodes seem far busier being a parody of recent events then being their own plot and after the first couple of those episodes it just bored me.

I stopped watching one piece after the Marineford arc. Even before and during that arc the excessive amount of filler and padding annoyed me. I seriously watched in amazement as Ace spend a whole episode walking up a bunch of stairs. Rather then big filler arcs one piece seemed to just stretch out every small moment and it tired me out. Marineford had a lot of cool fights the Manga left to the background, I'm pretty sure Crocodile fought almost every major character and I hoped the padding would put its focus on that and provide some more cool moments but it didn't. That missed changed combined with all the padding just tired me out of watching anymore.

 

[kuolonen]

Currently watching Jormungand and seriously considering to stop watching it seems far too directed. A reason I stop watching many, many series.

What I mean by that is there's a very obvious design in advance of what each scene is supposed to convey and it'll only ever convey that one single thing.

There's the action scene in which nobody ever gets hurt unless they're faceless characters, designed to show off how skilled, dangerous and bad-ass the characters are (despite their obvious storm-trooper academy credentials). There's the death scene in which characters die but only ever after having one final deep conversation underlining the one single trait that defined their character. etc.

It annoys me to no end and appears highly artificial.

Urgh. Jormungand. I really had to force myself to watch that one to the end. Maybe having been in the army makes you a bad target audience for gunfight anime, but I couldn't help but constantly think:"That is not how you fight with guns, how are you missing at that range" etc.

OT: So many I have lost count. Thankfully many have already been mentioned so I don't have to bother. Except for one it seems: Breaking bad. I really hated Heisenberg, not when he turned bad, but way before that. He was such utter git with the temper of a badly raised 6-year old. Hypocrisy and all other bonanza on top of that, and I just couldn't watch the show after 3rd season, and just read the conclusion of plot from wikipedia. Sounded about as shit as I thought it would end. Really wished Gus would win.

 

[Gone Rampant]

Walking Dead, for being too angsty. Every single adaptation- AMC Show, Telltale and the comics- have all fallen to the same trap of killing people off for pointless angst.

 

[maffgibson]

Breaking Bad. Maybe halfway through the third or fourth series?

Basically, I felt it just all got too unrelentingly grim and angsty, and absolutely clear that nothing was going to work out well for anyone. Which for me, took away any element of suspense. I find "how is this all going to go wrong?" less interesting than "is this going to go wrong?", so I lost interest in where the plot was going. I have also had people tell me when I stopped watching was a bit of a lull in terms of real developments.

Maybe my Netflix binge watching was the wrong way to consume it, but I just found myself emotionally exhausted and wanting to watch something sillier. I think I switched over to Sons of Anarchy, which tries sometimes to be grim, but is fundamentally silly enough (intentionally and unintentionally) that it rarely overdoes it.

I am not arguing that Breaking Bad is not "good TV": the consensus says it is. But it lost me.

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

I don't know if I ever "stopped" watching something, as I intend to finish the shows I start watching no matter how bad... eventually.

But one show that I find it hard to get through is Revolutionary Girl Utena. I am only six episodes in, and I'm already starting to hate it's fucking guts. To be fair, I'm not an Ikuhara fan. Before Utena, I watched Penguindrum, and I absolutely hated it. I went into Utena hoping it would be better, and it's the same bullshit. The dub is the only thing carrying me through, because the awkward line delivery made it unintentionally hilarious, but even that is starting to wear thin.

Look, I like surreal, weird stuff. My favorite anime is FLCL. I'm also an Evangelion fan, so I'm fine with excessive symbolism, but I can't stand Ikuhara's style, characters, or his use of symbolism. It just pisses me off. I checked out his new show, and right off the bat I find it crap. Those are the only anime he's made outside of his manga and directing a few seasons of Sailor Moon, so I can safely say I'm not a fan.

The nicest thing I can say is that at least his openings are cool.

 

[JennAnge]

Supernatural. The one and only show I can think of where I prefer the light, funny 'monster of the week' episodes as opposed to the season arcs. Not that the season arcs would be so bad per se, if they did not ALWAYS follow the same formula. One of the brothers - Sam usually - screws up for reasons that get more and more contrived as the series goes on, there is SIBLING DRAMA up the wazoo and then eventually Dean cries and FAMILY PREVAILS in the finale. For a few seasons, that's okay, but every...bloody...season...What's worse is that the characters don't seem to evolve past this. If my bro caused a couple of apocalypse near misses and other sundry disasters, I'd either take anything else he does in stride or I'd drive a stake through his heart - probably the former, since hey, it's not like he meant it. I wouldn't go through the same emotional hamster wheel AGAIN as if this had never happened before. When they managed to contrive to get them fighting and not talking to each other in season 9 (9! FFS!) I just kinda stopped watching.

But damn I miss those monster of the week episodes. Even in the last season. When Supernatural works, it really does work...

 

[Kenbo Slice]

Can this apply to a magazine I used to subscribe to? Fuck it, I'm gonna talk about it anyways.

Well, when I was in high school I subscribed to a little magazine called Alternative Press because they talked about my favorite bands and it was actually a good way to discover new music. I was subscribed to it for about 9 years, I ended my subscription last year because for the last year or two they just talk about the same bands or artists. Every issue was about Ronnie Radke, Black Veil Brides, or Sleeping With Sirens. Jesus get off those bands nuts and try to get other great bands more exposure.

 

[Dr. Cakey]

]I don't know if I ever "stopped" watching something, as I intend to finish the shows I start watching no matter how bad... eventually.

But one show that I find it hard to get through is Revolutionary Girl Utena. I am only six episodes in, and I'm already starting to hate it's fucking guts. To be fair, I'm not an Ikuhara fan. Before Utena, I watched Penguindrum, and I absolutely hated it. I went into Utena hoping it would be better, and it's the same bullshit. The dub is the only thing carrying me through, because the awkward line delivery made it unintentionally hilarious, but even that is starting to wear thin.

Look, I like surreal, weird stuff. My favorite anime is FLCL. I'm also an Evangelion fan, so I'm fine with excessive symbolism, but I can't stand Ikuhara's style, characters, or his use of symbolism. It just pisses me off. I checked out his new show, and right off the bat I find it crap. Those are the only anime he's made outside of his manga and directing a few seasons of Sailor Moon, so I can safely say I'm not a fan.

The nicest thing I can say is that at least his openings are cool.

Why would you do that to yourself? I mean, I read (almost) all of Fate/stay night because I needed to understand it, and I'm eventually going to finish watching Brynhildr in the Darkness because good must triumph over evil, and right now half my Twitter feed is watching Aldnoah.Zero because they're communally reveling in its stupidity, but like...what's the point?

Now, maybe it's a good thing you're doing this because Ikuhara is pretty much perfect and maybe like five years from now you'll have a spontaneous revelation and Utena will become your favorite anime, but...it's 39 episodes! "Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku" is going to play seventeen more times before you're done. The shadow girls are going to appear...eleventy billion more times, I think.

Well, they do say love and hate are two sides of the same coin...

 

[Brennan]

Game of Thrones:
I stopped watching after... season 4, I think. The show had only been holding on by a thread with me. It's well done... but it's not a story.

When I say it's not a story, I mean it doesn't have anything resembling an arc or theme. Oh, some fans say it does, but they're projecting. It's not actually going anywhere, it's just a perpetually meandering soup of stuff happening, like a soap opera. Characters die, power changes hands, and then it all happens again in a different arrangement, and then again.

And nothing is going to change. It's painfully obvious that however it "ends", whoever gets the throne is gonna spend the likely short rest of their life fending off the next batch of psychopathic social climbers. Same with whoever gets the throne after them. It's in the culture of the world, no war or ruler is going to make a difference. It'll end slowly over centuries of incremental shifts, or it'll end in the medieval post-apocalypse of a second Long Winter (which will reset the cultural clock to "life is hell, people are worse" rather than improve anything). This world is a crapsack hamster wheel and none of these power plays matter.

It's just an asshole contest between sociopaths, and anyone who's not an asshole sociopath exists merely as a stage prop for the sociopaths to demonstrate their assholery on. Most of the cast I either give no fucks about or actively want dead, and the few I do kinda maybe like I have zero illusions about having any form of non-doomed future, so I feel like getting engaged is actually disincentivized.


I watched it because it was well done, out of a kind of academic appreciation, but I didn't really have fun, and in fact found the whole thing rather a mood killer. The last straw was how basically a whole season went by made of mostly filler with almost nothing actually happening, because the producers apparently decided to split one book into two seasons. To buy time waiting for the next book to come out, maybe? Couldn't have been to do the book justice, cause like I say: mostly filler.

Battlestar Galactica (reboot):
Similar to GoT, but worse, because while GoT is going nowhere, it's at least pretty honest and internally consistent in that. BSG lied. BSG's writers told their audience that they, like the Cylons, had a plan. Halfway through the series it started to become clear this wan't actually the case and never had been, for either the writers or the Cylons.

Plus the high asshole quotient of the cast wasn't as well justified. In GoT it's believable because the culture of that world raises people to be assholes, but in BSG you have a ragtag fleet that's a random cross section of more or less a modern first-world culture. I live in a modern first world culture. There's a lot of assholes, sure, but it isn't 98% asshole. More like 40%, depending on circumstances. There's at least enough non-assholes to keep it slowly lurching forward into a better world, instead of collapsing into... well, Westros.

I stopped watching halfway through season 2. Like with GoT it was hanging by a thread and I was really only watching it out of academic interest at that point. The writing was already starting to annoy me with how transparently the characters would spend a couple eps slowly leveling out into tolerable human beings while the writers were off distracted with character assassinating someone else, only to have the writers suddenly notice that "hey! X hasn't been meeting their 'conflicted' quota! Quick: make 'em do something shitty!". It was like all the characters were on leashes, always being yanked back to the arbitrary minimum mandated level of dysfunction, then wandering back out in the direction of growth only to be yanked back again. And again, and again, and again, in a steady, predictable rhythm.

Again: GoT has shittyness built into the culture of Westros, so the characters being shits is organically self maintaining. With BSG the writers' hand could be seen just reaching in and arbitrarily making people do stupid crap whenever a character was in danger of becoming no longer sufficiently dysfunctional.

The last straw was when Pegasus the technicolor war crime wagon showed up and everyone limply wrung their hands a little and then decided they were totes cool with all the assorted shithorror of it's crew once Cain was under a bus. At that point I threw up my hands and was like: "Y'all deserve each other, and I don't care if you live or die anymore".

 

[ryukage_sama]

I stopped watching Tenjou Tenge when the flashback had a flashback. I guess that makes it "too retrospective"?

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

]I don't know if I ever "stopped" watching something, as I intend to finish the shows I start watching no matter how bad... eventually.

But one show that I find it hard to get through is Revolutionary Girl Utena. I am only six episodes in, and I'm already starting to hate it's fucking guts. To be fair, I'm not an Ikuhara fan. Before Utena, I watched Penguindrum, and I absolutely hated it. I went into Utena hoping it would be better, and it's the same bullshit. The dub is the only thing carrying me through, because the awkward line delivery made it unintentionally hilarious, but even that is starting to wear thin.

Look, I like surreal, weird stuff. My favorite anime is FLCL. I'm also an Evangelion fan, so I'm fine with excessive symbolism, but I can't stand Ikuhara's style, characters, or his use of symbolism. It just pisses me off. I checked out his new show, and right off the bat I find it crap. Those are the only anime he's made outside of his manga and directing a few seasons of Sailor Moon, so I can safely say I'm not a fan.

The nicest thing I can say is that at least his openings are cool.

Why would you do that to yourself? I mean, I read (almost) all of Fate/stay night because I needed to understand it, and I'm eventually going to finish watching Brynhildr in the Darkness because good must triumph over evil, and right now half my Twitter feed is watching Aldnoah.Zero because they're communally reveling in its stupidity, but like...what's the point?

I like searching for bad anime. I have fun riffing them or yelling at them.

Now, maybe it's a good thing you're doing this because Ikuhara is pretty much perfect and maybe like five years from now you'll have a spontaneous revelation and Utena will become your favorite anime, but...

yeah, sure.

Like I said, I've seen his other work, and I hated those, too, particularly Penguindrum, which was my introduction to him. It's fine if you like his stuff, but they do nothing for me but piss me off.

.it's 39 episodes! "Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku" is going to play seventeen more times before you're done. The shadow girls are going to appear...eleventy billion more times, I think.

Goddammit.

And this is part of what makes it so hard to get through.

 

[Mahorfeus]

Bleach. Well, the anime at least. I still like the manga, but gods, the anime... it became too... fillery.

Generally, I can accept the necessity of filler arcs when it comes to animated adaptations of ongoing manga series. But when you put three of them within a fucking canon arc, especially ones that are ridiculous what-if scenarios with absolutely no regard to anything even resembling continuity, then you've fucked up. Hell, even the Bount arc managed to avoid doing that.

Those arcs completely disrupted the action and flow of the anime for me, and overall, just made me lose interest in it entirely.

Then again, that's Studio Pierrot for you.

 

[Brennan]

To be fair, it's all build up for the 1.5 last books, it's like playing Mass Effect 2 and stopping before the final mission.

I don't really buy that. I've read synopsis of the later books, and I don't really see any such pattern forming. Like I say, I thnk it's a case of fans projecting their expectations/desires onto the work and seeing what they want to see.

But even if it were true, the series hitching up it's britches at the very last moment doesn't in itself automatically make everything that came before meaningful. Meandering is still meandering, so all a last minute pull together proves is that the earlier stuff could have been edited and/or framed a lot better. It doesn't make it good, it just upgrades it from completely pointless to merely massively inefficient. It also basically makes it look like the "story" was just retconned in and/or tacked on at the last minute instead of intended all along.

The biggest theme of the series is along the lines of "good people usually makes shitty leaders", it's pretty omnipresent along the series, Robert was a good man but a terrible king, so was Ned, who got completely outmanouvered politically and got killed for it. Daenarys also starts to slip to this, becoming hopeless since her only way to base her rule is to cull the opposition and being too nice to do it and John also makes a lot of enemies despite the best intentions.

The good leaders are people like Tywin, Tyrion and Stannis (though it's debatable about the latter) who aren't afraid of crossing the line when it calls to. It also averts some of the famous tropes, like the duel of the mountain and the viper who's a clear shout out to The Princess Bride. Or instead of a glorious final battle, entire wars ends in a single assassination attempt.

Again, this seems like projection to me. I've seen lots of different things claimed as a theme for GoT, but from where I sit those themes look to be more what people find in it "free range" that what's solidly intended by the author(s).

The theme you describe in particular is watery at best IMO because:

A) It's a bit debatable how "good" of a person some of those bad rulers were/are, and as many of the total bad rulers were as much bad people as the good rulers, so there isn't really a pattern as such. The good/bad person/ruler quadrants are quite muddy unless you're cherry picking your examples and qualifications.

B) Often the reason they make bad rulers is not because they're good people, but because they go about being good in a catastrophically stupid way. They don't fail because they're good, they fail because they're bluntly naive and massively unsavvy, so the "good people make bad rulers" theme only really follows if you believe being good must always = being stupid, which is naive in it's own right. It'd be an immature "edgy for the sake of edgy" and/or "mistaking pessimism for cynicism" theme, not a realistic one.

C) Even if there was a pattern, Tyrion alone would completely break it by being both an extremely canny leader and a good person, who fails primarily because other people's bigotry completely overshadows anything he can possibly do rather than though bad decisions on his own part. The "worst" thing he does is kill you-know-who (sorry: don't know spoiler tag code), and by the time he does that he's already so solidly disenfranchised that only a TPK of his family by outside forces could put him back in any position of power. He was fucked regardless, and always had been.

 

[CaitSeith]

Stopped watching JonTron because he became too random.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

I stopped watching Durararara when it became so japanese I couldn't understand the language. (Liked the first episode though, but I can't be arsed to read subtitles and enjoy visuals cohesively on a first sitting.)

I stopped watching Psycho-Pass when it went from kinda okay to dirt stupid. (About when the helmets show up en masse.)

I stopped watching SAO when Asuna and Kirito decide to be the parents of a stupid A.I. and the show officially got too dumb about two card board cut outs with no investment in what could happen to them.

I stopped reading One Piece because it just got too stupid and boring to even continue bothering. Between the boring two 'bad-asses' Luffy and Zolo, overly long and drawn out and hilariously boring fights, and bag full of meaningless side characters thrown at you each arc, I hit my limit on what I could take.

Seriously, if they trimmed down a lot, made Luffy and Zolo earn 1% of their badassitude and let more of the cast have their moment to shine, the series could be pretty awesome. OH, and remove the whole pirate thing, because it has no bearing whatsoever on the heroes, especially the main. They should be just... adventurers, because that's all they really do.

Attack on Titan: I pretty much stopped after the first chapter because I instantly realized what it would all be, and nothing this person can create with be able to justify the stupid of the Titans, or the gore porn it wants itself to be. Seriously, they're magic monsters that just don't even. "They're not hungry but they eat people. And only people." That is just inefficient and trying to be terrible for no good reason.

 

[DirgeNovak]

I stopped watching Family Guy when it became too shit around season nine.

If Dexter season eight hadn't been the last one, I'm not sure I'd have watched the next one. The final six episodes were so much fucking garbage. Nobody gave a shit about Hannah.

 

[Brennan]

Remember that being good in the series is different than being good this days, the values are different. In the general being good there is "not be a massive prick, and respect others"

I thought moral relativism was profound when I was a teenager. I've had more time to think about it since. All you actually need is just one single common premise, no matter how simple, for what defines any moral system as a "moral system" in the broadest sense (i.e. you can agree X is a "moral system" even if you completely disagree with it as a moral system, which is necessary in order for "morality" to even be a word), and with just that you can start extrapolating outward with logic. Not that modern morality does it that way, but at the same time, it's not really any less fair to, say, assert that the Romans were less socially advanced than modern societies for being slavers than it is to assert they were less technologically advanced for not smelting steel. Just 'cause these characters don't think they're assholes doesn't mean they aren't, it just means they don't have the tools to see what kind of asshole they're being.

Relativism is comfy, 'cause most people know they're not perfect, and it gives them an emergency ego parachute, and makes them feel pseudo-progressive at the same time. But it's not so logically fireproof as it first might seem, even in a solipsistic vacuum.

Regardless of any of that, movable goalposts in general make both debate and attempts at interpretation meaningless, as they allow one to stretch anything to fit any interpretation one wishes, so we're back to, as I said, "muddy unless you're cherry picking your examples and qualifications".

One important thing, Tyrion is not a very nice person, it might be different in the TV series but he isn't afraid to do terrible things for his gain, the only reason you could consider him "good" is because in comparison to the other rulers he's an okay guy and he can be empathic to other people.

I'll take your word for it in regards to the books. In the show he's played as pretty sympathetic, and one of the only characters who consistently shows empathy for others.

I stand by the rest though. There is no consistent pattern to support the interpretation of "good people make bad rulers", and even if there was, it'd IMO be a juvenile rather than mature theme.

I would suggest instead "foolish people make short lived rulers", but that's a bit too much of a no-brainer to be satisfying.