Slightly Off Center

Challenge #6

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Top Ten Times I Called It In And Walked Away

In no particular order, not alphabetical, chronological, or according to any level of importance -

1. Supernatural - I know people who watched it all and my hat's off to them, but after season eight, I knew it wasn't for me anymore.

2. Teen Wolf - sometime in season three or four, it went from being a show on MTV to an MTV show, and I was done.

3. House - end of season five or six, when not only had the characters grown stale, but the lighting had gone sour.

4. True Blood - somewhere in there, between seasons, I realized I couldn't do it anymore.

5. Game of Thrones - for all that I was enjoying myself, I realized it was a provisional, conditional love, and the creators had violated the last of those provisions.

6. Marvel comic movie adaptations - animated and live-action Spider-Man movies, Deadpool, the X-Men region, TV shows, the MCU as a whole. Much like House, the lighting's sour and the characters aren't nearly as much fun to watch anymore. I'll still come back from time to time, and leaving the movies is different from leaving the fandom, and it's not my fault they set standards that they then failed to meet.

7. X-Men comics in general and Joss Whedon in particular - because even though I watched Buffy and Angel long after walking away from Whedon, I knew from seeing him kill off a character he said he loved writing that he wasn't someone I could trust anymore, and when Marvel gave the go-ahead for that move on top of all the other repeated future ends of the world, I knew I couldn't trust them either.

8. No small number of fandom-based podcasts - because I don't have much patience for "um" and "like" and "you know" and other such filler words when I know you've taken notes and prepared for this well in advance, and you've also set up multiple Patreon tiers. When there's money involved, I expect you to use your time better than that.

9. Stargate Atlantis - because for all the raw entertainment value it offered, that value came tempered with a feeling of obligation and a gradual lack of playfulness - which can be done, provided the show commits to being more serious. I didn't get a sense of that.

10. Doctor Who - because the tidal nature of the show meant it'd gone out, and I never bothered to wander back to find if it's come back in, which told me all I needed to know about how much I'd enjoy spending more time with it.

Let me emphasize this isn't an anti-rec list, this isn't a set of warnings about not getting into something to begin with, this isn't even much of a set of complaints. This is something that, for all the frustrations involved, makes me happy because learning to know when to stop is a very grown-up skill. Knowing when you need a break or you've had enough takes work, and acting on that takes additional work. It's something that can be applied to situations more serious than a TV show - a friend who's no longer fun to hang out with, a job that's draining you dry. Walking away from something that ultimately doesn't mean much makes it easier to do it for something significantly more serious.

I could probably come up with another five or ten without much trouble, but if I did, it'd turn into an airing of grievances instead of a meditation on learning a new skill in a safe, controlled environment.