What do you hate about your favorite games, TV shows, and books?

[Kelsey MacAilbert]

Even among huge fans of a work of fiction, there are generally things that aren't that good. In Fairy Tail the magic council's behavior is completely nonsensical and the main characters are super quick to forgive attempted mass murder. Assassin's Creed IV was a fun naval romp, but the controls were absolutely horrible during ship boarding and the story was meh. Watching Blackbeard gush about Kenway like he was a sueish fanfiction OC during the intro had me rolling my eyes fast enough to power a small generator. Almost every interior I enter in Dragon Age 2 is something I've seen 15 times before, and they really don't take Mother's death all that seriously. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is so buggy, it partially defines the game.

I am a fan of all of these works, I just hate these aspects of them. Not enough to stop watching or playing, because they are good works, but enough to feel irritated about them. That's the feeling this thread is about.

[Haladir]

Okay, I'll bite...

Books
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien:

• The general lack of female characters.
  
• The depressing/annoying/boring slog that is the story of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum wandering aimlessly in Mordor.
  
• The fact that so much of modern fantasy literature has pretty much copied Middle-Earth's pseudo-medieval European setting/tropes/look-and-feel, etc.

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling:

• As a character, Harry remains pretty much static through the whole series. There is basically zero character development.
  
• Bloat. The last two books in the series would have been twice as good if they'd been half as long.
  
• Everything got tied up far too neatly in the end.

The Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy

• Clancy's neoconservative politics.
  
• In later books, his characters become little more than mouthpieces to spout Clancy's neoconservative politics.
  
• Bloat. As Clancy's popularity increased, his editors gave him a longer leash, and didn't reign in his excesses.
  
• The misogyny that suffuses every book in the series. Every female character is either a Madonna or a whore.

Films
The Star Wars trilogy.

• General lack of female characters.
  
• The atrocious dialogue.
  
• Moral of the story: All problems can be solved by blowing them up.

Avatar

• While the effects were amazing, 3-D movies give me a splitting headache.
  
• The plot was a re-hash of imperialist fantasies of a white man "going native" to save the natives. (c.f. Dances With Wolves)
  
• Wouldn't the ability to study an alien ecosystem be far more valuable than mining? Wouldn't transporting heavy metals across interstellar distances be far more expensive than the metal itself?
  
• If not, why didn't the Earth forces simply nuke Pandora from orbit? That wouldn't have affected the unobtainium, and would have made it so much easier to mine.
  
• They actually used the word "unobtainium" in the movie.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe films

• General dearth of female characters. (Hmmm... I sense a theme here.)

[blood_kite]

For me it's the Mass Effect series. A huge number of big and small choices you can make during each game with hundreds of decisions flags carried over between games to make it a bit personalized for each person who played it. BioWare made statements that the huge and varied decisions that each player made over the three games could never boil down to a final A, B, C decision. What did we get at the end of the third game? Make a Red, Blue, Green decision with the choices made over all three games having only minimal impact on which of the three choices were available.

Extended endings and DLC did little to improve upon the end of an epic trilogy.

[Orthos]

Since I'm currently replaying it...

Final Fantasy VI
> Game is littered with bugs. (Thankfully few are game-breaking unless you deliberately search them out. But a few might just pop up out of nowhere - looking at you, Sketch glitch.)
> Characters range between "utterly useless" and "omg must have in party all the time" with very little middle ground. (Somewhat made up for given how many times the game splits the massive number of PCs into multiple parties, so you really can get a chance to use everyone.)
> For a game noted for being the first FF with a female main protagonist (or two), there are only three playable female characters in an otherwise ginormous cast, and only seven named female characters in the whole game - three of whom are those PCs, two are dead girlfriends of male PCs, and one is a PC's dead mother. That leaves one female NPC who has a name who isn't dead. Maybe add three or four more if you count boss monsters and Espers.
> Magic system requires extensive grinding to be useful.
> Way too easy to lose certain items forever.

I'm sure I could think of a few things more if I took the time.

[Pan]

TTRPG community is too small to sustain several games that cater to vastly different playstyles. So every discussion is a fight to the death to get the game tailored specifically to personal tastes for one camp or the next.

[Xzaral]

Let's see.....

One Piece

Nami's boobs (and boobs in the series in general). She starts off very reasonable. But as the series continues they just keep growing.

High School of the Dead

Excessive Fan Service that I thought ruined the mood of the series overall.

Final Fantasy XIV

Design of the primals the Summoner calls.

World of Warcraft

Thrall.
The talents (at least last time I played).

Civilization

One......more......turn......

[MMCJawa]

A Song of Ice and Fire (books)

Yeah its cliche, and it really doesn't bother me that much, but the wait between books is brutal. Also, even though I liked a Feast for Crows, waiting 10ish years for any chapter about Daenerys, Jon, or Tyrion was so so aggravating

Game of Thrones (show)

The fact that 4 seasons in, the producers still feel the need to shoehorn extraneous nudity and rape, even when the scene really really doesn't need it

HP Lovecraft and Colleagues

Oh god the racism

Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card

I think the are (or were in the case of OSC) great authors, who unfortunately have some pretty repugnant political beliefs

[Irontruth]

MMCJawa wrote:

A Song of Ice and Fire (books)

Yeah its cliche, and it really doesn't bother me that much, but the wait between books is brutal. Also, even though I liked a Feast for Crows, waiting 10ish years for any chapter about Daenerys, Jon, or Tyrion was so so aggravating

For me it was because a Feast for Crows was so bad (comparatively). It took me a while to figure out why it was bad... I didn't care about any of the characters. It's predominantly filled with characters who didn't have POV chapters before that book. The effect is that you've read 3 very long books about A, B, C story lines, then you get a book about characters who are involved with them, but in some cases only tangentially.

Spoiler:

Then we wait 10 years for book 5, which for one major character, puts them exactly where they were at some point during book 2, like we spent two whole books following them on this progression and he just says "f&!! it, lets start over". I still liked book 5, but man, that was frustrating.