What have you hate-watched and why?

[Alzrius]

I'm currently watching the third season of The Seven Deadly Sins, and while it's not a hate-watch per se, I'm already groaning and wishing I was through with it.

The reason I'm watching it is because I have a policy of trying to finish a show once I start it, simply because I prefer to know what I'm talking about if and when I badmouth something. Having watched the first two seasons a couple of years ago on Netflix, I therefore feel committed to finishing the next two now. And while there are a lot of seinen anime that I enjoy, this is decidedly not one of them.

An update here: to my complete shock, I found myself actually liking season three of The Seven Deadly Sins, to the point where I eagerly moved on to season four. This is the main reason why I like to partake of media before I talk about it, because every so often something like this happens, and I'd have missed something I enjoy otherwise.

I attribute this to the characters in the show facing actual opposition and setbacks that phase them, rather than enemies who are barely strong enough to make them roll their eyes. The good guys still have trump cards galore and snappy one-liners aplenty, but now the enemies have their own, and there are genuine struggles going on. This is something I liked, since I prefer heroes to actually be underdogs rather than shooting fish in a barrel. You can have overpowered protagonists who are fun to watch (Overlord springs to mind here), but it's a careful balancing act. This show wasn't able to pull it off, so it's nice to see it move into a storytelling mode that suits it better.

 

[tragicThaumaturge]

The only times I can think of when I watch something I already know I'm not going to like, it's because a friend or loved one adores it and insists on me giving it a chance. I usually end up doing it as a favor, and try to be as polite as possible when I inform them that I in fact did not enjoy it.

 

[Herschel]

I did, however, force myself to finish reading Lord Foul's Bane because so many people rave about the Thomas Covenant series. I thoroughly hated the experience but I thought I had give it a try to see if it got better. It didn't.

Lord Foul's Bane is great in hindsight because it makes you hate Covenant amidst a hodge-podge of events and seeing how people taking things to extremes tends to bite them hard. There's little payoff in it. The Illearth War is brilliant because it shows the outcomes and interactions, but it is a long time to get any payoff from the first book. The series is a chain of cause-and-effect, but Lord Foul's Bane is pretty much cause and background information.