What makes you stop reading a webcomic?

[Jenny-Toons]

When the main plot of the story gets side-tracked in favor of fanservice. Listen, I like hot chicks and dudes as much as the next person. But if I started reading a horror thriller about the old mansion haunted by the obsessed painter who kills anyone that moves in, I don't wanna see several chapters catered to a beach episode. I wanna see if they defeat the painter specter.

[brilliiant]

I'll usually give a comic a couple episodes to get me invested, if the characterization is annoying to me, or if it gets overly repetitive, or if the direction it goes starts to leave a bad taste in my mouth I'll dip.

[ben]

Too many updates that don’t drive the story forward in any way.

[Kelheor]

I barely dropped any comics I read, but the ones I decided to drop were 1. Going nowhere, with characters just drifting in the world for no reason (I'll let you find out which comic was that) for many damn years. 2. The author keeps adding the drama for secondary characters I don't care about, and it looks like it's done for the sake of prolonging the comic by any means possible.

[NickRowler]

nazis

I 2nd this. I come to the point where I am tired of seeing them. It is used way too much as a go too. Plus with the raise of neo-nazi mentality in my country, I am just sick of them.

For me the major one is readability. If I can not physically read your comic due to bad font, I have no reason to continue.

I also really hate strawmen. This is made worst when the MC that is arguing against them is an asshole. Some of it is a slippery slope into dehumanizing of groups of people. I feel like even for an antagonist, there should be some effort to give them some complexity.

[puddle]

I'm biased, but too much combat- or hard to track combat. I'm not really a fighting-action person, though. My eyes tend to gloss over when I try to read comics with unnecessarily graphic levels of human/human cruelty- I just can't do it

[vothnthorvaldson]

Recently, I'm not reading a lot of new comics, so this did not happen for a while. But from the time I read more:

(This is for stories I stopped reading after a good amount of chapters, and when already invested in the story. When looking for new stuff to read, I drop most stories after update 3 to 5, not necessarily because they are bad, but because that's not what I fell like reading).

• When the quality drops significantly and keep dropping. I don't mind if the creator decide to draw simplier, drop colours etc because they realised they cannot go on with the initial style, however, in this case, I expect as good, but simpler drawings. What I dislike is slow drop of quality, generally the writing quality drops too, making you wonder if the person still like their story.

• Stuff I did not sign for, and are senseless. Surprises can be great, but they have to make sense. I drop a romance story that started as a nice healthy relationship, with non-romance subplots, making me think it would be about realistic, mature relationship and the influence of other life circumstances on it. Then after a while, out if the blue, with zero explanation, it became an unhealthy, tropey, dubcon thing and non-'romance' (read 'crime') subplots were dropped. What? That was the worst case I read, but I read many things falling into this trap (it can't only be bad writting? Maybe getting influenced by other persons? I don't get it).

[ghostmaya]

when Internet connection is lost~

[azzy-m]

Actually, it's mostly because I'm busy drawing comics all the time now that there aren't many comics I can keep up with, but I assume this is about the quality of the comics itself - when the comic in question has seriously detracted from the reason why I started reading it in the first place, AKA when the second half of a story isn't as good as the first.

The only webcomic I've legitimately dropped because of this specific reason is Refund High School on Webtoon. The main four characters were really interesting and all had equal screentime... and then later on in the story it all the characters became sidelined in favor of Aru and Mook's romance which I never really cared about much in the first place

Dropped it when I realize that I couldn't give a shit about the villain running around doing shenanigans, I can't even remember the guy's name

[silverraven0]

Not really, it could be three at once but if all of the stuff I listed up there is in one webcomic, I'll be shunning it till the hell broke loose.

Only in my mind tho.

[kimketli]

bad cliffhangers.
I don't have problem with cliffhangers. I have problem when the creator puts cliffhanger at the end of the episode just because he/she needed one... Then in the next episode it turns out it wasn't really that much of an important thing. So, all in one I hate empty promises

[DokiDokiTsuna]

-When it feels like all the setup isn't going to pay off

-When I realize the comic is less of an actual story and more of a slideshow for fanservice

-When I stop liking the art

^That last one is a big one; I've dropped many comics over that.
It's not that I'm shallow; it's just that my expectations for writing in comics are already fairly low. I'm used to following along with a story that appears stupid/boring as long as the art holds up. Comics need time to get rolling, after all; it's possible that I just have to wait to get to the "good parts".

But when the art doesn't do it for me anymore...what's the point in sticking around at all? I'm not going to fully enjoy a story I don't even want to look at, so I might as well just leave.

[Rhonder]

I'm one of those who has a hard time keeping up with comics even that I am still trying to follow, but to the topic some that come to mind:

• Poor pacing. Usually this comes in the form of too slow but I've also seen a few examples of too fast too. On the too slow side, it varies. Some of them are genuinely good stories but written in a style that mimics like weekly manga chapters or monthly comic issues... but then drip feeds pages out one at a time. So you wind up with months of build up to the chapter's climax usually, which works really great in series that update faster, or in larger chunks, but isn't so great for the typical web comic style upload schedule. I've also just seen those that are paced way too slow in general, there was one comic that I read where the characters meandered around and had a conversation mid-action scene for like... 6 months, without ever resolving the action scene. It was pretty silly LOL. Those that move too fast typically just lack proper build up at the beginning and lose my interest when I don't understand what's going on even like 10 pages in lol.

• Author rebooting series and stopping new content while doing so. Nothing drops my attention faster as an active reader than the author deciding to do a series reboot (bonus points if it's in the middle of a scene or arc) and then like... not also continuing to advance the story on the back end. There was one comic on Tapas I was following that did this and took so long to catch back up to the present (and ended up changing a number of things that I had liked from the original version along the way...) that I stopped reading after a few months of the reboot. I was invested in the original version, couldn't be bothered to reinvest in the new one, sadly.

---

Those are actually all that come to mind, usually the other times I'm either still reading, but just at such a slow pace that I might as well not be, or didn't get hooked at the beginning anyways and so stopped before I even got started.

[Mari]

if it's mine coz I suck also because cringe.

But it usually needs to be completely outrageous for me to stop reading, I can't sleep at night if I don't know how something ended, I NEED TO KNOW YO.

So I hate-read a lot. But to completely stop reading would probably be glorification of rape, racism just because racism (I mean not used for the plot in any way) or kiddie diddling.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

Me not understand.

[Kiweevil]

Updates that are absolutely obviously just filler because the writer of the comic didn't think it through. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt and read on a little farther to see what future developments hold, but I'll drop a story if it gets unbearably plotless and full of filler. At that point it feels like the writer lost the care and drive they once had for the project. And I'll do the same thing goes for animation....especially certain anime and adult cartoons cough cough

[Kaylim]

Repetitiveness of story-line.

I like slice of life and monster of the week comics just fine. But sometimes those comics get stuck in a routine, where every episode or update follows the same pattern, where the same things happen to the same characters over and over. If it's not a groundhog day comic, then count me out haha.

There was a monster-of-the-week comic I followed pretty religiously where the main characters would always get rescued at the end by the same powerful character. But after years of updates I was like why don't the MC's call in that character at the beginning of the monster fight?! Why always wait till the end?! The rescue had become predictable and lost its shine, especially since I was supposed to take these character seriously.

[CresentFox]

For me:
1. Pacing. If it's too fast (frustrated), if it's too slow (bored). However, there are a few series that starts out really slow and then builds up quick. I don't mind those.
2. Filler/Flashback/Backstory. If these are within a reasonable frame then I don't have a problem. What I mean is don't spend '10 years' explaining a backstory that can be sum up in 1,2 episodes.
3. When I lose interest in the comic.

[Azifri]

I rarely drop a comic on purposes. If I lose interest, I usually just forget about it, it just happens like that I probably still go back to the comic later, when/if I remember about it, because I like to know what happened.

There are very few comics that I actively unsubscribed, and as far as I can remember it was because of:
- poor readability, or couldn't figure out the art.
- couldn't follow the writing (too many grammar issues, etc).
- story makes no progress or has way too many fillers and this goes on for chapters and chapters.
- when it feels like the author is giving a moral discourse through the characters (if it's in character and makes sense in the story context it's fine).

[darkone4587]

Honestly life in general.
Most of the time if I'm reading anything actively I'll try to finish the story, but sometimes I'll stop for a while and then come back to it later, unless I just forget to.