20 / 68
Dec 2019

Ever been disappointed by a recommendation from a friend who thought this thing would be just right for you? Ever read the description of a book/movie/comic and on paper it seems like it should be right up your alley but then you read it/watch it and it's not?

Vent here for fun and share your experiences!


I'll start with a couple of my own about monster romances.

So this manga pops up on my Amazon recommendations, Monster and the Beast by Renji, and I thought, "Oh neat! A cool-ass-looking monster with an older man who likes to sleep around. I'll add this to my cart." I read it … and was kinda disappointed. (SPOILERS AHEAD so I'll put it in a summary)

Summary

It started off interestingly enough, but then their romantic plot in the first volume just shifted to a normal jealousy tsundere type situation. You know, the kind where the tsundere is jealous of the other giving their time and physical attention to other people when they aren't even a couple yet. It's like, we have a monster here! Make him act a bit more inhuman, a bit more territorial and possessive at least! But instead he's more like an angsty 13 year old boy. I can get the tsundere jealousy arc with any ol' human couple …

Even though the jealousy plot concluded at the end of the first volume, it irked me. This monster romance that I thought would be an interesting examination of two non-mainstream archetypes turned out to be pretty mundane. Monsters are supposed to be exciting, thrilling, dangerous even! (unless it's a total subversion of the idea, like having a monster in a HELLA domestic situation. Like How to Keep a Mummy. I liked that. It was cute.)

My second experience was with some original fiction I came across on tumblr. The story was about a girl living with the monster under her bed and the monster in her closet. She forms a poly relationship with them and it was pretty great up until the last installment. They bring up the idea of children at the very end and the girl was happy with the idea of 'little monsters of their own' running around the house, and I'm like "NOOOOOOOOOO"
For me, one reason I like the idea of monster romances is because of the incompatibility between species with zero possibility of cross-breeding. It's about the fun without the risk of pregnancy! At least personally, according to my taste.

and kudos to anyone who read through my rant, you've earned nuggets of info about my personal tastes LOL

  • created

    Dec '19
  • last reply

    Dec '19
  • 67

    replies

  • 2.6k

    views

  • 38

    users

  • 130

    likes

  • 1

    link

Frequent Posters

There are 67 replies with an estimated read time of 12 minutes.

The Mayfair Witches series.
I knew Ann Rice is not a proper writer for me (I previously read some Vampire Chronicles books and they were not... really good). But every time I saw anything connected to the Mayfair series like a hand made perfume with this name and very mysterious aroma description, or a witchy dress dedicated to the series, or anything really, I thought "ah, that's so good and just what I need right now". Witches, thundery air, magnolia scent in New Orleans... Gods, never was I this wrong.
The books were beyond terrible and it just went from bad to horrifyingly fcking disgusting and tasteless. No words can describe my frustration.

I'm feeling this way with a lot of anime. All the characters look basically the same and there's a lot of screaming. Make them stop.

I wanted to like Moana but I ended up hating it even more than Frozen. The songs to me just weren't catchy at all and were actually pretty annoying especially the scene with the giant crab singing about how shiny he is.

I also wanted to like Fire Force because it's from the same author that created Soul Eater but like many people on the internet I did not appreciate how the fanservice was handled.

I felt this way about A Song Of Ice And Fire.

I love reading (and writing) twisty long epic fantasies, so I really wanted to get hooked. I kept reading, and reading, and reading... and reading... I just never connected with it. Too cold for me, and there wasn't anyone I could really root for, anyone I would want to be instead of me, anywhere I would want to escape my own life and go live.

On top of which, he employed the "character I swore was dead, is now alive" trope, which is my biggest pet peeve of all.

Suffice it to say I have not seen Game of Thrones.

That bit about cross-breed incompatibility...
THANK YOU!!! YES!! THIS PERSON GETS IT! :cry_02:
i just looked up Monster and The Beast and GAHD this shit right here is so my type! i'm so disappointed to know the plot is so mundane given the non mainstream couple : ( (which is ALSO my type too! big cool monster and middle aged person :heart:) and the art is so pretty to boot orz

Funny enough, i thought of how disappointing The Ancient Magus' Bride was before i even read what you wrote lmao. I don't even know where to start with this, but it simply just boils down to your grievances as well. You have an interesting setup, premise, and couple, and do absolutely nothing about it (and the protagonist is such a Mary Sue if you ask me) I LOVED the concept, but was left extremely disappointed i just want my wasted time back lol.

Bakuman was quite informative and sometimes funny (only a single character was genuinely funny, actually...) but the "romance" and all the female characters (and the fat=bad and stupid) absolutely ruined it for me. I thought i'd love it because it's made by the guy behind Death Note and it's about the life of a mangaka but my god. He should never write romance or women ever again.

friend, your tastes are on point :ok_hand: :two_hearts:

Reasons why I read manga instead, the really weird and fun ones always end up not getting and anime (they are too niche) and the screaming is more funny than annoying when you read it instead of hearing it, *Looking at you black clover <_<

To be fair Death Notes romance was also horrible and the female characters weren't that great either, dude really needs to read less philosophy books and more Romance novels XD

To me It was rising of the shield hero web novel, started out great, but at the end the boss fight goes like this:

"BBEG: I use the power of infinity to kill you
Naofumi: Well I use the power of infinity +1!!!!
BBEG: Ipossibruuuuuuuuuuu blegh XP

and everybody lives happy ever after with their own harem of in slaved women the end"

yeah needless to say I was not happy with that ending whatsoever >=/

I guess one thing that's pretty big now but didn't appeal to me is that new webseries Hazbin Hotel. Like, don't get me wrong, I liked the sneak-peek animation they put out months before the official pilot. But then I saw the pilot, and it...it didn't work for me personally.

Like, disregarding all of the controversy surrounding the creators (another can of worms I don't even know about, tbh), it's not really my brand of humor -- kinda feels like a lot of the adult animations these days (not including Archer and Bob's Burgers -- actually like those shows). That, and I just don't do sing-alongs.

For me it's Game of Thrones. I just...don't see the appeal of GRR Martin's writing. I know it has an audience and that's cool--like what you like, but I found his books to be just real...really boring in parts and then so violent in other parts to try and make up for how boring it was before. I didn't really know what I was getting out of those books so I just kinda finished the series by reading the summaries on Wikipedia.

other than that it's Evangelion for a lot of the same reasons (though I will say I liked it better than Game of Thrones). They're lovely mechs, there was beautiful art, and the story had a lot of potential, but I wasn't a fan of the execution. There were moments that I liked, and I'm glad I watched it for my anime literacy (the surreal parts of Evangelion are the only reason to watch Evangelion) but a majority of it was boring long shots of nothing that felt more like a high school anime mixed in with random panty shots. So much wacky panties in this very serious robot anime that didn't really need to be there IMO. Like I get there were issues in creating the show, but half of Evangelion could have been edited out.

So I love me some horror. I love me some sensual horror with gothic trimmings. Like a spoopy Dark Fairytale. That's my jam. I grew up on a lot of horror, Tim Burton, fairytales, etc.

...Yet I could not really enjoy Penny Dreadful. Everything was just...so...I dunno...lifeless. No one except for one character seemed to actual put EFFORT into it. I really just could not enjoy it, even though it had all sorts of elements I usually LOVE and throw my all into. Yet I just could not feel ANYTHING for anybody in this dark tale.

So I gave up on it. Boo.

"The Wheel of Time" series. Started out ok-ish, then became almost comically bad by book 4, and nauseatingly so by book 5 ( a book I actually put in the trash, which I should feel ashamed for, but I don't). Put me off the fantasy genre for years. First time I encountered a piece of popular fiction so bad it actually made me angry.

So yeah, the tv show will probably be a huge success, lol.

Monogatari is supposedly famous and legendary, but I could never really get into it.

I read maybe the first 2 chapters of the prequel and thought it was okay.

As a general aside in this thread: does anyone else avoid something generally whenever they hear that "everybody" likes it? Pretty much every time that the whole "with it" world Omgloves a thing, I don't.

...yes...
I still haven't watched Game of Thrones and now that it's over, everyone else stopped talking about it.

Good.

Hmmm I dunno, I was looking for something new to read, and some people on deviantart suggested that I should read The Hunger Games. And, yanno, it's not the worst book I've ever read or even the most disappointing, but I just felt completely neutral while reading it, which, in a way, was worse. I just couldn't connect with Katniss and I felt like the love interests in the story were kind of poorly drawn. Like, there's a really sweet moment in the story when bread kid throws her a piece of bread--showing her some kindness and selflessness--and I think that's the most I ever felt during that story.I wish Katniss had been even a little bit more cold and cruel to offset the kindness bread kid showed her. That might have made it more interesting.

Still better than His Dark Materials though.

Love reading through everyone's posts! Keep 'em coming!

@Rosso I was actually interested in looking into the Magus Bride OVA a while back but things got in the way. And then I heard about the iffy elements like Chise's age and that put it down farther on the list for me. Funnily enough, after I read some more complaints from a person about the series, it prompted me start my monster romance novel. And now after reading your post it's going another notch down the list. Haha!

@CodeMonkeyArts My husband tried watching that! He found it dropped off after the first three episodes and I think he finally quit after episode 6. And yeah, it did sound interesting! (Though at first I thought it was about a lady galavanting around with literary monsters and figures solving supernatural mysteries)

@snowy My husband had been reading Wheel of Time since his youth and I think he said pretty much the same thing about it! As I recall, he said it just turns into a cycle of X gets abducted, the others save them. And whoa, I did not know they're making a show about it

I just started the series and am on the fence about continuing. It's a staple in the fantasy genre so I feel obliged to read it but it's been difficult to get into the world and a lot of the characters come off as...awkward?

The 'A Darker Shade of Magic' series. I read the first but couldn't get through the second. The story and characters felt like they were getting shallower rather than deeper and a few off-putting straw men discussions made what should have been an interesting world more bland than cotton ball soup

I legitimately enjoyed the first book! Which is why the second was such a let down.

Seriously, don't bother Those are hours of your life you can never recover. You'd get more entertainment out of reading the facebook terms of service.
"Awkward" is right, and they turn that up to 11. These characters not only keep repeating the same actions, dialogue and inner monologue, the author keeps describing it with literally the same fucking sentences, chapter after chapter, book after book. It's like a cut-and-paste tutorial.
And then there's this weird obsession with forcing situations that make the female characters strip down to their underwear. Which would be fine, if it was funny, plot-related, or even remotely titilating. But it's just bizarre !
Female character 1 : "I'm wearing only my shift !"
Female character 2 : "So am I ! Tee hee !"
Female character 3 : "All of us have taken off most of our clothes ! Whatever next ?"
Female character 4 :"Shift ! Shift ! Shifty shift shift !"
I am only slightly exaggerating.

For all that is mighty, I REALLY wanted to like RWBY volume 5. RWBY volumes 1-3 had an okay-ish story but good character interactions and SERIOUSLY AMAZING fight scenes and music. All of that kind of gets lost in volume 5, along with just in general terrible writing, which is what killed my interest in the entire show.

Divergent series. I felt kind of obligated to give the Divergent series a try - it was popular at the time and I heard it compared to the Hunger Games, which I liked. All I got was a below average dystopian story from the movie. I think I DNF'd the book at like, 100 pages.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. People I follow praise this book all the time and I thought, hey, it's a 200-paged book and people say it's good. Why not give it a try? And what did I get? A book filled with shoehorned-in, needlessly complicated metaphors about simple things the characters were doing to the point that it's hard to tell which ones are products of figurative language and which ones are actual events happening in real life, with 4 main characters but only one is really fleshed out, and an overall half-baked book

that's
written
like this
for no apparent
reason.

If you asked me which book I hated two years ago I would most definitely say this LMAO

oh man, yes thanks for reminding me of how dry the Pullman books were despite the hype. Man. Golden Compass sure was a thing for five minutes, ya? I think I was just way too old to get into it. I was in college at the time.

Stranger Things I love sci fi. I love 80s movies. I love Retrowave soundtracks. I love grotesque alien monsters. I even love D&D.
Stranger Things? Not so much. The first two seasons bored the bejeezus out of me, the third was a little better. But for whatever reason (probably the mania for it in the public eye) it just never clicked with me.

The CW DC Comics shows. (and pretty much every show on the CW except for All-American)

I used to really like them, but after Arrow's 3rd season and The Flash's 2nd season, I couldn't stand the shows anymore.

The writer is a woman and I can say their newest work, Platinum End, has a better cast of female characters and less focus on the romance and it's better too. It's been a solid manga all around. Hoping it gets an anime. Also, no screaming people, at least that I can remember off the top of my head.

Oh man, SAME. Though I haven't seen the third season yet. Don't have much motivation to, especially with so much good anime recently. I'm sorry, but the writing and characters in Stranger Things are just terrible. Predictable plot lines and I really hate kid characters that DON'T ACT LIKE KIDS. They act like sarcastic and annoying little adults rather than kids.

Yeah that pisses me off too.

Hmm, two off the top of my head:

re: Game of Thrones - I had started hearing about this series around 2011/12 and wound up getting a box set with the first 4 books for cheap from Costco to give a shot. Sounded pretty cool: huge fantasy epic, lots of interesting characters, dragons?? But... I couldn't make it beyond chapter 10 or so of the first book. I tried like 3 different times separated by a year or more each. Something about his writing style and/or pacing just did not click with me, like at all. Everything just moves at a glacial pace and it's bouncing between too many characters before letting you get acquainted with any of them first, and blegh. I tried the show out, watching 1/2 or so of the first episode and gotta say, I do think I would like that better just because it moves at a faster pace. But I can't be bothered at this point.

Attack on Titan - This one's really petty, but back when this series was first starting to air its anime and it was all the rage, one of my shonen loving friends insisted I had to watch it. I'm also a huge shonen fan, so a few days later I sat down to watch the first episode and... the art style just doesn't jive with me for some reason. I couldn't continue watching past Ep. 1 because I didn't like how it looked :X

I’m not the only one! I found the art and concepts really cool but I could NOT get into it for the life of me.

This is the main reason why I haven't started it

The heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan. I LOVE, LOVE Percy Jackson series, more because of the 1st pov maybe. And the heroes of Olympus just fill me with disappointment when it didn't have the 1st pov and continues with 3rd pov the whole series. Well, the Kane chronicles, Magnus Chase and the rest is beck in 1st pov so I won't be complaining more about it.

Oh, btw, the Percy Jackson movies is s*it.

Oh, Hunger Games! I remember really liking the first book but the second and third is just disappointing? And i don't really like the movies. The actress playing her just make me feel odd watching the movie because she somehow looks out of place(?). No idea how to phrase it. :stuck_out_tongue:

And I do remember that a new hunger game new book will come out next year, if I don't get it wrong, so we'll see what I'll be about.

Pretty much every popular hyped franchise out there. Like I sometimes I feel like some series live up to the hype but like 80% i've tried getting into were just trash and not even worth being called good, just mediocre.

Never knew she was a woman =o
learn something new every day =)

I'm pretty disappointed with how Steven Universe ended. I loved the show but the ending almost stained the whole series for me. It just seemed like everything was resolved a bit too easily and the horrible things done weren't really addressed, nor punished.

I also want to like Harry Potter more than I do. I enjoy it but I didn't read past book 5 and it was hard for me to get through that. I'm not sure if it's the story itself or the fact that the franchise got too big, but I couldn't get HP to really stick with me and I grew up with it

Oh, and cardio. I know you're good for me but I hate you so very much :cry_01:

Oh man, I'm preparing myself for a whole lot of hate by admitting this...
Star wars. I can not for the life of me finish any star wars movie and I have tried them all. IDK what is wrong with me, but I just get bored. Doesn't matter if it's an old classic star wars movie or a new one, they just can't seem to hold my attention.

I'm a massive Star Wars fan and had never read the Plagueis book. I wouldn't say I disliked it, I actually did enjoy it and would say I like it, but I didn't like it nearly as much as I thought I would. I'll never read it again, and was disappointed with at least a third of the book.

In the past this would happen a lot with movies. I think it looks right up my alley and I end up not liking it. Same with comics. It's pretty rare these days as I've grown to know my specific taste very well.