Media you just can't get into or can't get into a second time around.

[Strigon]

I was also not a fan of Doctor Who at all for the longest time. I've warmed to it since, but the problem from my view is even though there are some absolutely fantastic episodes, it seems like I have to wade through a lot of bad to decent episodes to get there. I have a hard time mustering enthusiasm to watch a new season or continue catching up on the classic era.

Oh, very much this.
For quite a while, if you had asked me if I were a Doctor Who fan, I would have enthusiastically said yes. Whenever a new series came out, though, I'd ignore it for months until I was completely starved for something to watch.
A bad episode might have a few good moments, but by and large, the show is only as good as their idea for an episode. And ideas that I find intriguing enough to get excited about are scarce, indeed.

Dresden Files - look, I love urban fantasy. Charles de Lint is easily one of my favorite writers ever. I liked the tv series by the end (the first few episodes were clunky at best, but it eventually found it's rhythm). I made it through the first three books. I've been told that the series gets better, and I've certainly read and enjoyed trashier (any given D&D novel, for example), but I have just not been compelled to get the next one. Or ever re-read them, which is very unusual for me.

To be fair, the series changes drastically. It's sort of like one of those serial TV shows that starts out in a set of weekly unrelated events, then switches to a more coherent narrative a few weeks in. Except in my experience, the shows usually get worse after that point, whereas Dresden improves.
It has gotten to the point where I kind of wish Jim Butcher would rewrite the first five or so books to get the main plot underway sooner. I keep telling my friends how great the series is, but I realize halfway through talking about his earlier works that I'm really a fan of, like, the latter 50%.

Anyway, Dark Souls was that for me. I like RPGs, I like tactical, responsive combat, I enjoy a challenge, I should like the game. The combat just feels anemic to me, though, like my character suffers extreme arthritis and can't muster enough strength to do more than lightly tap their opponent. Something about the aesthetic also makes me feel like the world is incredibly empty and shallow, despite the fact I know it has reasonably well-developed lore.

Also, Skyrim. There's a ton of content there, but none of it feels meaningfully different. Every class of enemy feels basically the same, except for some standouts like giants and dragons. Combat feels the same whether I'm a heavy weapons orc fighting a group of chaurus, or a lightly armoured redguard fighting bandits, or a sneaky rogue fighting vampires, or a high elf wizard fighting draugr.
The combat just fails to grip me, and it's obvious that, as much as they've crammed in other content into the game, it's fundamentally a game about fighting your way through dungeons.
I enjoyed my first playthrough, until eventually getting bored (not because I didn't like the game, but because I'd played it for about five hours a day for months), but I've never been able to get invested since.

[Hagashager]

Getting into, A Song of Ice and Fire. Read to the fourth book, just felt way too oppressive. It's also got that Soap Opera style of writing where they push characters to the top of the pile only to push the Jenga bricks on them for the tragedy/irony... and then repeat then process. Which made it fairly predictable to me despite all the "it's not like all those books with plot shield'ed characters" or "it's gritty and realistic" and so on. Plus I guess I don't like gritty depictions of people in pain and misery all that much.

Yes, I agree. I decided to start ASoI&F because GRRM is apparently a massive fan of another author I adore.

His stories are good for a while but some of it leans very far into Terry Goodkind territory. I cannot stand that kind of intense, insane cruelty mixed with graphic violence. I loved it as a teen but now I find it trashy and mean-spirited.

[Yora]

Also, Skyrim. There's a ton of content there, but none of it feels meaningfully different. Every class of enemy feels basically the same, except for some standouts like giants and dragons. Combat feels the same whether I'm a heavy weapons orc fighting a group of chaurus, or a lightly armoured redguard fighting bandits, or a sneaky rogue fighting vampires, or a high elf wizard fighting draugr.
The combat just fails to grip me, and it's obvious that, as much as they've crammed in other content into the game, it's fundamentally a game about fighting your way through dungeons.

I think Bethesda RPGs are in general really quite bad. Morrowind has an amazing setting, but the gameplay is just as bad as in all the other games. But the other games don't even have that.
Skyrim is pretty, which gives it a certain charm. But the gameplay is still bad. I think I have some 100 hours in that game, but that is stretched out over 8 years. I finally made it through the two main quests lines a few weeks ago and they are really laughably bad. I think on my last run I was also listening to audiobooks almost the entire time.

[Razade]

Won't happen. Brandon has gone on record saying he believes that GRRM is a fantastic writer and gives a list of things he thinks GRRM does better than him, but always ends that he put down GoT and vowed not to read any of his other books because he was "too mean to his characters."

This is one of the many reasons I can't get into Sanderson. So I guess put this one down for me. I love fantasy novels, even not great ones, and by all merits people seem to adore Sanderson. I've had friends and family members suggest I start any number of his series and I've tried a few and...he just doesn't click with me. His world building, as someone who loves world building, just seems uninspired and joyless. The worlds don't feel alive and for how well crafted the "magic" systems of his work are put together it all seems complex for the same of sounding really cool and innovative when half a dozen far worse anime have done more or less the same thing he's doing.

I'm also for really long books but I feel at some point he's just trying a bit to hard to cram stuff in that really didn't need to be there. If you're going to make 10 books each a thousand pages make them all fun to read. I don't need another boring lecture on how the wind moving factors into how you're wiggling your fingers for magic.

Rick and Morty is another. I'm all for subversive comedy with some intelligence. I think this one has more to do with its fanbase who want to declare it the best thing ever when it's maybe 10 years too late to be considered anything but derivative of other material.

[Azuresun]

Oddly enough. Naruto. I can remember liking the show in High School. I recently tried to give it a re-watch and it's just..... Terrible.

For me, Bleach was much the same thing. It was my first shonen battle manga, and it really blew my mind with these epic and visceral battles. As time went on, the cracks really started to show--weak characterisation, power level bloat, interesting characters getting sidelined, Ichigo losing his fun and likeable personality, and an increasing sense that it was style over substance with no long-term planning. I have fond memories of everything before Hueco Mundo, but after seeing more modern series that do the same thing better, I don't think I could go back.

I dropped out of Game of Thrones shortly into season 4. It felt like at that point, they were going out of their way to establish that everyone in this world was just awful and you should be rooting for the Night King--you know how a big chunk of season 3 was fleshing out the wildlings as being this developed culture and not just a mob of savage barbarians? Here's this other group of wildlings who are rapey edgelord cannibals!

In general, I'm pretty much disinterested with the love affair that 21st century TV has been having with grimdark. At this point, it feels like some absurd race to the bottom--our main character is a drug dealer! Yeah, well ours is a serial killer!

[halfeye]

In general, I'm pretty much disinterested with the love affair that 21st century TV has been having with grimdark.

There has been grimdark on the TV for a very long time. The limits on nudity and violence may have shifted slightly, but they aren't really needed for the dark.

These are British and from the 1960s, but I'd be surprised if the USA had nothing like them:

Spindoe, Big Breadwinnner Hog, Callan.

[DomaDoma]

It will surprise no one that I completely adore Stormlight Archive. And the worldbuilding definitely is part of it - figuring out things like Wit and the Stormfather is like a third of the fun!

But I don't love the broader sociopolitical world, or the magic system. That really is needlessly complicated.

[Rodin]

Distopic sci-fi. With Dark Matter being the exception, every time I try I get bored or miserable and stop watching. I didn't get past 20 minutes watching the first episode of Firefly. Ditto The Expanse. New Star Trek, never after the first movie. Never touched Discovery. I'm not jumping to get CBS access for Picard. Speaking of Dark Matter, it was the loss of memory trope that I was interested in. It was no surprise to me that once they solved the mystery of the memory loss and just dealt with the distopia universe they built, i.e. the last season, I gradually lost interest and stopped watching. Negan made The Walking Dead not fun anymore. It's why I was hating on Flash with The Thinker season. They lose in every episode.

I don't think Firefly counts as dystopic. The roots are Western, mixed with a bit of Heist. Things seem a bit harsh because we're viewing things from the bottom rung of society, but people in general are shown to be doing okay. Our heroes have bad run-ins with the authorities because they are criminals, and the Alliance officials we see are genuinely trying to keep the peace in a lawless region of space.

And yes, there are evil higher-ups in the Alliance that are major villains in the series. They also work in the shadows because what they are doing is very illegal.

For that matter, I don't think nuTrek or Discovery count either. Dystopia is a very specific definition, and at no point can the Federation be accused of that.

[Kitten Champion]

For that matter, I don't think nuTrek or Discovery count either. Dystopia is a very specific definition, and at no point can the Federation be accused of that.

Yeah, it would be a considerable stretch to call any of the recent Trek dystopic. I'd call the movies at least... heightened. Certainly in terms of characterizations in its interpretation of the TOS crew and the often frantic way they're shot, but specifically the way stakes are almost always set as high as they can conceivably go every time.

So it does seems more much apocalyptic than old Trek. Though it's not even close to Dark Matter in terms of cynicism.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I guess I'll participate. Media which I would count for this would be things I feel I've tried out a significant amount, yet haven't had much interest in. So things like watching 1 or 2 episodes of a show or playing a game for an hour or so only doesn't count in my mind (Doctor Who, Firefly, Terminator TV show, various Bioware games). Sometimes it doesn't take very long at all to realize that a piece of media is Not For Me. Mostly, I try to avoid media if I expect to not care about them. (Marvel movies, Star Wars) These are all things I feel I have given a better shot at than all the things I just mentioned.

Okay, here we go. Game of Thrones. Years ago I had a friend who showed me the show's first season when I would go hang out with him. It didn't engage me much. Probably doesn't help that I only really liked watching a couple of the many characters and kept wanting to have the plot be about something it was never going to be about. The same friend showed me several seasons of Dexter too, and I liked that one, but never resumed watching it once that friend had caught me up on what had been released so far.

Adventure Time. By all rights, it's something I should like, as its style of humor is seemingly similar to mine. It just never clicked. Maybe the art style was a bit too cartoony so it never felt like anything was really grounded at all. Jake's seemingly arbitrary, weird powers mostly just confused me whenever they were shown.

Rick and Morty. I didn't find any of the characters likeable. Not liking any of the characters presented doesn't always mean I won't get into it, but the jokes seemed to mostly be edgelord type material.

One Punch Man. It's got an interesting set up and some engaging characters and ideas, but there's just something about the anticlimactic action sequences it constantly wants to show that makes me feel the joke is overused. It's like they were proud of the one gag and wanted to keep doing it over and over, not realizing that it loses impact every time it gets repeated.

Open-world inventory-management RPG games. (Bethesda style games. But not necessarily limited to that one company.) Something about the design of this type of game just doesn't appeal to me. The world doesn't draw my attention enough to care what I'm actually supposed to be doing, so I just tend to wander around randomly looking at stuff and collecting semi-valuable objects until I get bored enough to quit.

Hayao Miyazaki films. Maybe this is just a byproduct of not really getting into anime in general.

[GentlemanVoodoo]

The ones that stick out the most:

Dr. Who: Tried to get into the show but like some have said, a few great episodes and to many bad ones.

Family Guy/The Simpsons/American Dad: Lumping these together since it is mostly the same plot and set up for the shows with only a few differences. Many of the gags are over played and old.

Rick and Morty: Don't get the point and find nothing funny about it.

Law and Order: In their first few seasons they had some interesting plots but again the same old drull repeated over and over. SVU is the most guilty of this. I will say Criminal Intent was interesting but that was only due to the chemistry that Kathryn Erbe and Vincent D' Onofrio had together.

South Park: In it's hay-day, the show was great. But in the days of youtube and other social media that parody current events, it feels and looks outdated.

Star Trek Discovery: After the first episode my only thought was "WTF is this crap?" All I have to say on it.

Game of Thrones: Stopped watching after the 3rd season as I got bored with it. Started to pick it up again and couldn't finish past season 5.

[Velaryon]

Where to start? If I did one post about each thing, I could probably fill this entire thread to 50 pages myself. But I'll just throw out a few for now.

1. Dragonlance, both as a book series and as a D&D setting. I think I would have enjoyed the books more if I had discovered them at a younger age. But as an adult, I find Raistlin (and somewhat Caramon,by extension) interesting, but nothing else. Tasslehoff is amusing for awhile, but his schtick wears thin pretty quick, all the other characters are forgettable to me. The world feels painfully generic, and like there isn't much narrative room to even use it as a campaign setting. I found Lord Soth interesting when he was lifted out of this setting and plunked into Ravenloft, though.

2. Rick and Morty. I'm just gonna say it - this show is bad. It's not clever, no matter how much it thinks it is. The characters are obnoxious, the art style is horrendous, and it has THE worst fan base in the world, bar none. Yes, worse than Star Wars fans.

3. Adventure Time. I think cartoons should look better than something drawn by a 4 year-old.

4. Long anime series like Bleach, or One Piece. Just the thought of trying to get into a series with hundreds upon hundreds of episodes like that is exhausting to me. I don't think I could manage it even if I didn't have a job, other interests, etc.

5. The Dark Souls games. I could just say "I'm not a masochist" and leave it at that, but frankly I think that a) if it's possible to get stuck for multiple hours on the tutorial boss, you're doing something wrong as a game designer. And in the few hours I spent with the game, I felt the challenge came less from interesting game mechanics than from clunky controls. I felt like my character was moving through molasses the whole time.