For some odd reason, before I drifted off to sleep last night, I thought of the TV show Gotham. I loved it when it first started. Dark. Moody. Filled with conflict. And I watched it every week for quite a while.
And then, there was a storyline that took Jada Pinkett-Smith, who was a badass, to some weird place where she’d been kidnapped, and they used people to supply body parts for people who had enough money to pay for them. I watched that one episode, and it disturbed me so much, I erased the show from my “watch” list, and I never looked at it again. There are just some things that go too far for me. It makes me uncomfortable to follow them.
It’s not always something disturbing that turns me off. I might start a book where the writing’s so flat, I can’t hang in there and move to something new. The protagonist might be so stupid that I want to hit in her head because she doesn’t have a brain anyway. Or the mood might be so depressing, I feel like I should take a Valium to finish the book. There are many, many reasons that I give up on a storyline. And just like me, I’m sure everyone else has their own “enough is enough” moments in a story.
What turns you off? What makes you give up on a book and go on to the next one?
Judi Lynn 
Gratuitous graphic violence against women, children, and animals. Actually, even if it’s not gratiutous, even if it ‘moves the story forward’ … a halfway decent writer/showrunner can get the same effect without it.
Funnily enough I am fine with gore, (well not, ‘slasher’ gore, because that’s just silly), because I know it’s not real, not realistic … but those three acts of violence? Sometimes it seems like the world’s societies are built upon them, and I don’t want to have to deal with it in my entertainment too.
Well, that and bad writing too. 🙂
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Some shows just get too dark for me. This was one of them. You can’t unsee what you watched, but I try really hard to block it out.
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I’m getting burned out by social messages these days. Something starts off well, then turns into a platform for some agenda. That kills it for me. I don’t even care what the message is. I want to be entertained, not preached at.
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Ditto.
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I used to be a huge fan of Gotham, too. I’m pretty sure I follow it through all the seasons until the end, although it did start to go off the rails. I do remember liking the series finale.
Recently, I tried to watch Shogun. I loved the original mini-series back in the 1980s, but the new one had a horrible scene of violence that so bothered me, I watched that single first episode and wrote the series off. Violence has just gotten too graphic these days. It’s like everyone wants shock value. Not for me!
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I agree. There’s enough violence on the evening news. I don’t need it for entertainment.
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Absolutely!
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I don’t necessarily have any specific thing that turns me off in fiction. The way my brain works, disturbing stuff if it is in fiction is easy for me to compartmentalize.
The trick is if I’m watching something based on specific real-world events, I have way more trouble doing that. It’s one of the reasons why I can watch hyper-violent action movies and not be bothered one bit, but I tend to stay clear of “True Crime” documentaries and the like.
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Your brain’s more developed than mine:) I watch fiction and get caught up in it, so that it feels real.
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I don’t pick up a horror story because I don’t like anything that makes me afraid to turn out the light. Other than that, the only other thing that makes me give up on a book is tons of typos and point of view issues.
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I can’t watched violence for violence sake, especially when it involves children. The movie Freedom handled child trafficking well.
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