Why did you stop reading a comic/story?

Let's see.
Some reasons would be:

• If very little happens in the story over a long period of real time (this doesn't apply to hiatuses. This is when the story is actively being updated, but nothing major enough happens to hold my interest).

• If the characters stop being likeable to me. Sometimes character development can drastically change the way a character behaves. This isn't always bad, but sometimes it can cause me to stop liking the character because of how different they are compared to the way they were before, when I liked them.

• Too much action/blood/gore/fights without anything to balance it out. More often than not, I'll become bored of a series like this.

• If the story becomes too repetitive and the same thing happens over and over again for a long period of time. This is why I tend to not like most battle shonen that much anymore.

I think those are the main ones. Thinking back on it now, there aren't many series that I have outright stopped myself from reading, though.

Character Regression

Imagine reading a story, getting invested for months, only for a lot of character progress and the like to magically disappear.

It almost hurts as much as watching my Sims game crash hours after my last save.

When the characters start doing idiotic things just to make the story proceed. I dropped many Light Novels because of this. They act completely out of character just to either fall into some crazy labyrinth or maybe lose of the support cast to a villain or something.

Poor pacing and general plot development..

My least favorite experience being a single fight that started early on that lasted a year to read through, it spanned like 4 chapters out of the 7 it had at the time.. I just got bored of how overwhelmingly dramatic it felt for what actually caused it. That's when I knew I didn't need to see every detail of a fight lmao

I don't typicall unsubscribe stories, but when i drop a comic it's usually because the comic for whatever reason stopped being good and/or interesting, or if the story started showing problematic aspects that I no longer feel comfortable reading (this happened to me way more often that it should tbh)

I mean most of the time I drop a comic because they stopped updating after a year, being real--but other reasons are:

1. Doesn't follow human logic. Like you got people that don't react to things, you got plots that are convoluted and I do like an air of mystery and weirdness, but there's also instances where it's like "I don't understand at all what's happening" and I'll kinda leave.
2. Doesn't follow page logic: panelling, honestly. The panelling.
3. The font is so terrible. I have dropped good comics because of comic sans. Unless you are Toby Fox with a really good reason, like why? There are other comics I love, but they hyphenate every other word. It's very OCD of me but I have a very hard time with this. Unless your comic is a direct translation from another language, why should you ever have to hyphenate? You wrote it. You designed this page. I'm sometimes guilty of hyphenating, too, we're all doing our best. But every other word? I have to love your comic so freakin much to still read it if it's hyphenated like 6 times a page. Fit your text in there before you draw it. Please.
4. A plot that was originally for a neat exciting premise turns out only exists for horny reasons. And I'm just not in the mood for that right now, tbh.
5. We've been in a talking heads situation for like 2 years. Comics are really slow to make, and one of the bummers about webcomics is I have to read it in real time. A conversation can literally take 2 years and that just saps your energy right out of your body.
6. The plot is too generic to interest me anymore.
7. it lacks aesthetics/it's only aesthetics
8. Creator turned out to be a huge asshole on twitter.

But honestly I'm not too, too picky, despite this huge list, and I'll give a comic kind of a long time before I nope out if I already went through all the trouble to subscribe.

Here's something completely different: I dropped a comic due to the fan base.

I had been enjoying the plot. One female character was set up as the villain in the first episode showing the future, and the comic was playing catch up to that point.

While the villain is clearly not a wholly good person, she doesn't actually do anything wrong. Terrible things keep happening to her, and she fights against them. If the story was from her pov she'd be a hero.

But the fanbase gleeful enjoys the horrors inflicted on this poor girl. Someone even tried to poison her so she'd abort her unborn child and people CHEERED the perpetrator on.

I just couldn't get past that. I heard that stuff happens in the future that she does that fully pushes her into villainy, but honestly, it just made me sad that she doesn't get a not horrible ending. So I dropped it.

Some of my reasons:

• uncomfortable themes that I don't agree with or that make me uncomfortable as noncon/dubcon or incest
• frequent uploads but a very slow story making the narrative extremely vague and I keep forgetting what happened
• stories with an extremely slow start due to for example too much lore or introductions
• unreadable fonts

ah this is an interesting thread!
In my case it's either
I didn't click
I just don't, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't I have in fact interacted with less stories as I grew older
or
I'm not attached to fiction anymore if I stop I will probably forget about it, just enjoy what I enjoyed and then move on with my life.
If I had to choose in between experiencing a story or cleaning up my fish-tank, or finishing a watercolour study or going out with friends, the real life ones would probably take up priority, because I guess I'm getting more stimulated by real life than by a story. When I was younger I had read, watched, listened to, and played so many stories that at this point very few actually grip me or make me feel something.
it's like the phrase "everything has been done before". I've seen it before and I know where it's going and I'm not getting anything new or interesting from it.

• Infodumps. Lots and lots of infodumps. Characters talking for pages upon pages about the lore of the story instead of... y'know... showing you stuff. I get it, dear author, it's a fantasy world, it took you a long time to craft it and its culture and you want to make sure that your readers are aware of it... but dammit, there are better ways to show it than "character X explaining the entire political system of a fictional nation for five pages in a row while sitting at a table"! D:
• Romance and/or smut being the only focus of the story. I just can't bring myself to care, sorry.
• Poor pacing and/or zero progression. Stories that get stuck for MONTHS on the same scene with new pages adding little to nothing new to the plot or, alternatively, jumping from a scene to another without ever giving closure to anything.
• Offensive/disrespectful content.
• The author being an ass. Yes, I dropped comics exactly for that reason, even though I was a fan of the story.

I agree with your last bullet. I only allow that if and only readers like me will sooner realize that the MCs are in deep trouble. Like the creator was so great that s/he can trick both readers and characters into misleading paths of the masterpiece. The ones that do unexpected but superb elements of surprise.

So much I was glad to read and be aware of ahead of time! Very grateful to stumble upon this topic

It's rare for me to drop a work but when I do, it's for the following reasons:

-creator adding their fetish into the work (sorry, it's always glaringly obvious and uncomfortable)
-characters/plot having no development (someone else mentioned this, I'm sorry but I can't wait twenty chapters for things to happen if the characters are literally sitting around)
-story plot not making any sense after awhile
-one-dimensional characters (ie bad guy bad because evil, softie who does no wrong but gets beaten up by everyone, mysterious guy mysterious because reasons, etc - boring)

I remember reading a comic on Webtoon and it was a pretty fun super hero ordeal... and then a character just started using gay as an insult. A main character. The only main character of color if I remember correctly. Yeah, I have no patience for that, I noted right out of there.

it is rare to see this when most BL that I have read are in a realistic world, I rarely finish them until the end because 2 main reasons:
-The 2 main leads are basically the only characters and even when it is an anime or manga, the characters become boring and repetitive, because the author just looks for excuses for them to be horny trying to be "unpredictable" doing stuff in different places, the rest of the cast are just a distraction or an obstacle for the relationship, and these characters cannot exist by themself, they only can exist to kiss each other and more.
-The author just disappears for a long time, or never returns.

I stop reading comics when:
-The Characters are annoying in any way, if they only exist to be annoying, I don't care if the story is a masterpiece and the artstyle is perfect. if the character is annoying or becomes annoying for any excuse, I'm done, -1 star. I'm talking about the main lead.
-Missunderstanding: Ok, it does happen, but come on! Why does nobody want to write a realistic or even reasonable way to deal with misunderstanding? Characters become jerks just because of "plot" it doesn't matter if they were BEST FRIENDS they won't even talk to each other just because "we need conflict", it is annoying and insulting, I quit if I find this kind of situation,

I know working on online comics is slow work, so I try to give comics a chance to prove themselves in the long run but sometimes it's just better to drop it. Usually it's because...

• Too much infodumbing. Like others have mentioned, it is not the best way to show information to the readers. I can understand a scene or two that feel a bit information heavy but more than that and it can feel like the characters are only there to deliver exposition.
• Flat MCs. I need to have curiosity and be interested in the main characters for the story to be worth reading. Unfortunately sometimes some characters start out as interesting but then they start to feel more like a cardboard mannequin that the story is happening to.
• Sudden shift to romance. Look, I am not opposed to a well written romance and sometimes I quite prefer reading them. I like both Jurassic Park and Pride & Prejudice, but if I start reading Jurassic Park I don't suddenly want it to be about who's the most handsome bachelor in the neighbourhood. I want to know what's happening with the dinosaurs!
• Reboots. This is a rare one but sometimes a comic maker will decide to redraw and possibly even rewrite their comic from the start. I was already invested in the story, so I'd rather see it move forward rather than backwards, so a reboot is an instant drop for me personally. (I don't mind redoing some scenes or redrawing a first chapter or something smaller like that.)

I love topics like these, since they read like a big list of 'things to watch out for' when creating my comic! I love how TV shows like Avatar manage to combine heaps of different story elements in a really cohesive way. Like, Blue Star Rebellion is gonna have some romance, but balancing that, so it doesn't deviate too much from the plot, will be really important. Same with balancing heavier, sadder moments with light, fun things; balancing character-building filler scenes with straight plot-progression; and making sure my pacing, while on the slower side, doesn't stall completely because I got too wrapped up in tonal moments.

For me, my turn-offs are:

• Plots which revolve around a contrived misunderstanding. It's not that hard to just TALK to each other! Or for characters to treat each other, especially if they're friends, with good faith.
• Flat characters. I'm so done with the 'reader stand-in' flat MC. One of the main reasons why a lot of YA fiction doesn't appeal to me anymore, despite the fact that I used to love it, and still return to my favourites constantly as an adult.
• Really annoying MC's. I can deal with an MC being a bit of an ass at first, but if their whole personality is wrapped up in that, it gets tiresome.
• Confusing panelling. If it's a chore to read, I'll probably stop reading it.
• Contrived world-building. It's not enough to say 'society hates this character because they're 'X'. If the author can't explain why that feature is so hated, beyond 'society is just prejudiced', it falls totally flat. My partner is a sociologist, and from living with him these past five years, I just can't deal with plots which revolve around such shallow understanding of how societies and cultures function. It ruins the immersion.
• Lack of character moments. I love episodes which deviate from the plot to provide little moments between characters which demonstrate close bonds between them. (I've just finished working on one of those.) Little moments of conversation, like two characters shooting the breeze in a bar, or a group of friends teasing each other and having a laugh - those make me care about the characters, which is a prerequisite for me caring about anything else.
• The pacing is too fast. This ties in with the above. If a story is only showing me plot, and it's not giving me any reason to care about the characters, I'm not going to care about any of it.