When has something been too mean-spirited or cruel for you to enjoy?

[Hawki]

Family Guy is one example, but it's been explained. Here's another one - Red Letter Media's reviews of the prequels.

Yes, I admit it, I like the prequels. I can admit there's flaws in them. That said, RLM's reviews make me uncomfortable in that while they take the micky out of the prequels (and I'm fine with that), they also attack Lucas, anyone involved with the production of the prequels, and anyone who likes the films (i.e. the implication being that you have to be an idiot to like them). I know it's played for fun, but I can't help but feel uneasy at how mean-spirited it gets. "Attack the product, not the person" is a saying I think has a lot of weight.

Grand Theft Auto and Game of Thrones do have their moments, but the former is a series I haven't played since Vice City, and the latter...well, it's a dark world. So far, in both the book and TV series, it hasn't really crossed the line for me.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

The In-Betweeners: I ended up pretty much watching the entire series, because when the show is funny, it's absolutely hilarious, but there does come a point when the never-ending embarrassment the protagonists go through starts to get almost disturbing. At some point you're like "um, ok, could something good finally happen to these guys, please?". On a somewhat similar note...

Hello Ladies: I get that Stuart is kind of an asshole, so he sort of brings a lot of the shit that happens to him on himself, but after a while I was just thinking "ok look, he's not THAT terrible of a person, can't you just throw him a bone and have something decent happen to him?".

Game of Thrones: Theon Greyjoy. On the plus side, Ramsay Bolton/Snow may be my most hated villain in history.

In the Company of Men: a seriously messed-up movie where basically everyone is mean-spirited and terrible.

Jurassic World: You know the scene. That bizarre scene where, for basically no reason whatsoever, they torture the babysitter character in a protracted death sequence. Was also totally out of place in the movie itself.

 

[Ryallen]

Because I can't really get into detail what exactly I find incredibly f-ed up without talking about some hentai that my friend had described to me because he can be a dickhead sometimes, I suppose that I should just explain where exactly I draw the line.

To me, it gets mean spirited when someone is suffering for whatever reason and I get the feeling that the writer was grinning while writing this particular scene. A sadistic smile, stretched across their face, distorting their features to reveal the sociopath beneath. The ecstasy found by this person from such actions can only be described as grotesque and monstrous.

As for real life, I reached the peak of my standards for humanity when some idiot that I have on Facebook for whatever reason though that it would be a good idea to post a video of some teenage girls throwing puppies from a bucket into a river. I barely made it five seconds before my entire day was ruined.

 

[balladbird]

Fox is unaffiliated with Fox News. That said, I agree with Zontar on that point. McFarlane is just a relentless douchebag towards anybody who disagrees with him on anything. He thinks that anybody who disagrees with him is stupid, period. As an example, when he did the episode Quagmire's Dad and the LGBT community did not respond kindly he called all f the dissenters "stupid". Yes, he knows better on LGBT issues than LGBT people. Anybody who disagrees with him is just clearly a, as he puts it, "stupid homosexual". The same guy thinks that abused people should stay in relationships with their abusers for the abuser's sake as well.

Ohh, I remember that PR explosion! As I recall, before the episode aired, he also bragged that the episode would involve the most mature and sympathetic depiction of a trans-person in the history of television. XD Credit where it's due, the primary story of the episode, with Quagmire coming to terms with his mom's decision, and ultimately finding happiness in her happiness, WAS surprisingly touching, as I recall. Still, you kinda lose the right to brag about how sympathetic and awesome your portrayal is when the touching parts make up maybe five minutes of the run time, and the rest is filled with characters laughing at the prospect of someone considering her to be a "real" woman, referring to her genitals as a disgusting mess, and having a character vomit for 30 uninterrupted seconds upon finding out they slept with her.


All that said, I have a hard time hating Seth Macfarlane. Funny enough, it's for the same reason I have a hard time hating Rush Limbaugh. They're terrible, narcissistic people, but... and maybe it's because I've been in the gaming community for so long- where people on all sides of our various "controversies" are eager to pretend they're wielding the mantle of creative freedom, or freedom of speech, or social justice, when they're really just trying to push their own preferences and silence others- but there's just something oddly charming and refreshingly honest about a person just coming right out and saying "This is my opinion, and if you don't share it, I think you're a moron who's beneath contempt!"

... I'll admit, it's the kind of "charming" that you don't want to spend any time listening to, though. >.<


As to the topic at hand... hmm... Attack on Titan has gotten nihilistic as heck lately. Game of Thrones will tear out your heart and stomp on it, but at least bad things happen to the bad people every now and then, too. In AoT, you can always count on some diabolos ex machina to prevent the heroes from accomplishing any meaningful damage to their enemies (yeah, I'm STILL salty as hell about *spoilerspoilerspoilerspoiler* a couple chapters back!) and any time it feels like humanity accomplishes anything, it's immediately taken away from them and they're put in a worse position than before.

To be fair to the manga, it IS written in such a way that I have juuuust enough hope to not quite drop it. I read the next chapter hoping something will finally break in humanity's favor, but I'm savvy enough to not really believe it'll happen, so I don't really enjoy reading it anymore. It's basically my 40 pages of being kicked in the nuts, per month

 

[Fox12]

The End of Evangelion. Seems the director thought everything had to be more edgy and grimdark when he had the opportunity to make a movie. Let's start with masturbating on an unconscious 14 year old girl, because that's what a kid in that situation would do. It has some pretty depressing deaths near the end, more so than the series. All the humor of the series was gone. I liked the original optimistic ending better. Yeah, the one in which they ran out of money and had to do existential dialogue over still images to finish it.

I can't blame you for feeling that way, but to be fair, End of Eva is actually pretty optimistic thematically. I almost reared up at the end, with Rei and Kaworu.

"We are the hope that one day human beings will be able to understand one another."
"And we are the words 'I love you.'"

 

[Spider RedNight]

As for real life, I reached the peak of my standards for humanity when some idiot that I have on Facebook for whatever reason though that it would be a good idea to post a video of some teenage girls throwing puppies from a bucket into a river. I barely made it five seconds before my entire day was ruined.

Bloody hell. I didn't even see the video and reading that sentence makes me sad. :c

 

[Neverhoodian]

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, specifically Vader becoming a mass child murderer. I knew things were going to be grim, but Christ that's fucked up. Even worse, this was the SECOND time he's personally sliced up kids (I refer you to the Tusken Raider camp in AotC).

Not only did it irrevocably destroy any possibility of Anakin being even a tiny bit likeable, but it also cast a pall over the far better portrayal of his character in the Clone Wars series and even his redemption in RotJ. They could have skirted around the whole issue by simply having Vader order his troops to "kill everyone" and leave it at that.[footnote]Or better yet, not have Jedi "younglings" in the first place. The very concept's messed up if you ask me; the Jedi Order essentially kidnaps toddlers and brainwashes them not to feel emotion. Who's supposed to be the bad guys again?[/footnote] But no, they had to have him personally cut children to pieces with a lightsaber. It's a big reason why I refuse to regard Episodes II and III as canon, official continuity be damned.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

The End of Evangelion. Seems the director thought everything had to be more edgy and grimdark when he had the opportunity to make a movie. Let's start with masturbating on an unconscious 14 year old girl, because that's what a kid in that situation would do. It has some pretty depressing deaths near the end, more so than the series. All the humor of the series was gone. I liked the original optimistic ending better. Yeah, the one in which they ran out of money and had to do existential dialogue over still images to finish it.

I initially though so as well, but upon further viewings that went away. By going even further than any grimdarky grimdarkness I'd seen, to me it became an unintentional comedy. It's so up its own ass, takes itself so seriously and is so bent on being as horrible as possible that it just becomes funny to me. When I realized that in some scenes you could literally arrange the dialogue lines in any random order and it'd still make the same amount of sense, I just burst out laughing. The fact that all the characters have degenerated into sociopathic dickholes by the end helps with this.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The End of Evangelion. Seems the director thought everything had to be more edgy and grimdark when he had the opportunity to make a movie. Let's start with masturbating on an unconscious 14 year old girl, because that's what a kid in that situation would do. It has some pretty depressing deaths near the end, more so than the series. All the humor of the series was gone. I liked the original optimistic ending better. Yeah, the one in which they ran out of money and had to do existential dialogue over still images to finish it.

You're right, it kind of is. But then it is the end of the world. The fact that everything seemed to collide into this heap of choatic brutality seemed to fit the tone of humanity's final day. But I don't blame people for not liking the movie, since it does leave you with this rather crushing sense of nihilism. You get the feeling Anno really wanted to hurt fans with this.

How is GTA V have this resentfulness towards humanity then Vice City and San Andreas and any of th GTA 4 campaigns?

Both Vice City and San Andreas are too cartoony to take seriously, and GTA4 (for all it's boring faults) had characters in it that atleast seemed to want to better their situation, and who had things and people they actually valued. In GTA5 everyone's a shithead, because the world is shit and everything's shit and shit, shit, shit, shit, fuck, fuck, fuck, cuz swears are great improve material. (*psht* No they are not, Dan Houser.)

 

[crimson5pheonix]

I honestly love the dark and depressing. The damaged characters, the broken lives, the crushing depression, and the meaningless spite. Though Texhnolyze came close to being too nihilistic to watch.

 

[SecondPrize]

Here's one: Game of Thrones

I stopped reading the books for just this reason, it's just too relentlessly cruel and violent. Any time anything even remotely good happens to a character it just makes you feel dreadful because you just know it's building towards something far more terrible down the road. There's no hope, no optimism, it's pure unhappy angry and often foul people being angry and foul to each other.

If I want unending cruelty and unhappiness I can examine facets of real life, so no thank you to having that in my fantasy as well. There was just this point mid-way through one of the books where I realized I was just miserable reading it as it was making me feel sad, after realizing that I put the book down and have never touched it since. Haven't seen the show either. Why bother? I already know how it's going to end: Miserably.

That's only because Martin doesn't know how to close a character arc any other way. He's good at writing deaths, at least.

OT-That Cyanide video didn't get me, nor does Hobo with a Shotgun because there isn't enough characterization to make one care. Bad things happening to people will get me, but bad things happening to representations of people which aren't carefully fleshed out won't do it. Nor will jokes about a group. You get a comic singling out someone at random and tearing into them and I'd walk out, but if you're making a good joke about a group I'll laugh. Eddie Murphy's ice cream bit is funny, despite poverty not being so because the jokes about no poor individual but rather the concept of one. Concepts don't have feelings. It's hard to cross a line with the representation of someone, because it means fuck all. Without meaning, it's difficult to engender strong emotions.

 

[The Raw Shark]

Pretty much any and all things that end with a pointless "And everyone died" or something of the variant.
Seriously, screw The Departed. I don't care what anyone says, that was one of the most abrupt and crappy endings I ever had the displeasure of viewing. I mean what the hell was even the point of it then?
"Ooooh look at me I'm so dark and edgy and I make everything pointless because that's how life is"
Then piss off and kill yourself already, there's a limit to how much anyone could tolerate crap like this. I mean did ANYONE get the message of the ending? Life sucks and you're just a pawn?

Spoiler

But then what's this about the other rat getting killed as well? And who the hell is Mark Walberg's character anyways?

It eludes me till today why people praise this movie as much as they do because the entire movie is completely pointless to watch over again.

Another example of crappy mean-spiritedness is just alot of horror games in general. I don't care what you tell me "da rules" are for horror games, if I have to sit through your god damn game for as much as I had to in order to reach the end then I BETTER receive a reasonable end to it.
Case in point:
Dying Light: The Following

Spoiler

Regardless of how good the rest of the expansion was, is this seriously how they're going to finish off the game? Just freaking kill of the protag and go "Now EVERYONE gets to die". Fuck you too Techland, thanks for repaying me paying for and playing your game and expansion all so you could just kick me in the nuts. Fuck Dying Light, I had fun before I got to these endings, now I don't ever want to go near it again.

I mean seriously if you want to do something like the Silent Hill games where it's kind of vague on what exactly happens in the end, fine. That's all good.
But don't shit on all my efforts just because you couldn't come up with a better ending.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

The End of Evangelion. Seems the director thought everything had to be more edgy and grimdark when he had the opportunity to make a movie. Let's start with masturbating on an unconscious 14 year old girl, because that's what a kid in that situation would do. It has some pretty depressing deaths near the end, more so than the series. All the humor of the series was gone. I liked the original optimistic ending better. Yeah, the one in which they ran out of money and had to do existential dialogue over still images to finish it.

Man, I thought End of Evangelion was cruel to its characters, but then I watched Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo. Holy shit; its like they watched their old movie, then watched Ant-Man and decided to apply the notion of going subatomic to the level of abject misery they could inflict: it's fucking surreal.

Here's one: Game of Thrones

I stopped reading the books for just this reason, it's just too relentlessly cruel and violent. Any time anything even remotely good happens to a character it just makes you feel dreadful because you just know it's building towards something far more terrible down the road. There's no hope, no optimism, it's pure unhappy angry and often foul people being angry and foul to each other.

If I want unending cruelty and unhappiness I can examine facets of real life, so no thank you to having that in my fantasy as well. There was just this point mid-way through one of the books where I realized I was just miserable reading it as it was making me feel sad, after realizing that I put the book down and have never touched it since. Haven't seen the show either. Why bother? I already know how it's going to end: Miserably.

It hit a low point for me when they did the rape of Sansa Stark and Theon was made to watch. I just got to the point of thinking "Jesus George, what's with all the rape?" - its like its the only way he knows to make his characters reprehensible.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, specifically Vader becoming a mass child murderer. I knew things were going to be grim, but Christ that's fucked up. Even worse, this was the SECOND time he's personally sliced up kids (I refer you to the Tusken Raider camp in AotC).

Not only did it irrevocably destroy any possibility of Anakin being even a tiny bit likeable, but it also cast a pall over the far better portrayal of his character in the Clone Wars series and even his redemption in RotJ. They could have skirted around the whole issue by simply having Vader order his troops to "kill everyone" and leave it at that.[footnote]Or better yet, not have Jedi "younglings" in the first place. The very concept's messed up if you ask me; the Jedi Order essentially kidnaps toddlers and brainwashes them not to feel emotion. Who's supposed to be the bad guys again?[/footnote] But no, they had to have him personally cut children to pieces with a lightsaber. It's a big reason why I refuse to regard Episodes II and III as canon, official continuity be damned.

It probably says something terrible about me that I find it really hard to get worked up about Anakin killing the Tusken Raiders. I mean it's awful, but since the only times we ever see them they're either brutally beating someone (seriously, what the fuck were they going to do with Shmi Skywalker?) or looking to club a farm boy to death.

Weirdly though, thanks to Clone Wars I can look upon the purge of the Jedi Temple in Ep3 as less the required moment where they make him do something so reprehensible we have to hate him but the genuinely terrible and tragic fall of a once great man. Seriously, Clone Wars!Anakin would probably have dropped a building on someone trying to pull that shit if he'd caught them.

 

[The Wykydtron]

For me it was Witcher 2. Everyone is mean, everyone is a joyless ****, there's a crazy amount of meaningless violence and the best lighthearted relief the game could come up with is you getting shitfaced and ending up a gutter with a bad tattoo and a hangover. I hear they toned it down in Witcher 3 though so maybe I can play that without getting depressed.

I like a bunch of other dark stuff is the strange thing and Witcher 2 isn't really darker than other dark stuff on average, it's no Game of Thrones. I think its just how there is literally no joy anywhere, it's needlessly dark in places (waaay more random rape references lads) and it just gets depressing.

It's the lack of hope really, taking Umineko No Naku Koro Ni as a bad example, there's a fuckload of dark stuff in that game and I mean seriously dark but it never ever gets so bad that you lose hope that things can never get better, which is a mean damn feat if anyone has played that game cuz that has some major bad times in there. Remember the time a few people got turned into butterflies by magic in the middle of a typhoon and got blown into a spiderweb and eaten alive? Remember the time when Erika did *insert one of a million bullshit things Erika does during Episodes 5 through 8 here*

Witcher 2 is just like "yeh the world is fucked,it's not getting better so deal with it kek"

 

[Hades]

The Patriot left me pretty disgusted at the constant hate mongering against the British. I do get why the one in power gets the antagonist role in a story about a revolution, especially one made by Americans but nothing the British did in the revolutionary war is bad enough to deserve a comparison with the Nazis. The British helped defeat the Nazis! Why on earth would you pretty much copy paste a Nazi atrocities and force the British to do it! Not that the British empire was all roses and sunshine but still, they weren't over the top mustache twirling villains and I'd even say they had plenty of legit points over the Americans...which the Patriot more then happily twists into something horrible.
The British promised to free any slave that fought for them. Rather then portraying this is relatively noble, if also a bit self serving the Patriot just has the southern plantation owner employ his black people as ''free men''(Ha!) and has the British pretty much kidnap them. Oh, and the American offer to do the same gets portrayed much more kindly.

A similar complaint can be made at the Kingdom of Heaven. That movie just HATES the Christians. If a crusader isn't a time traveling atheist then he's going to be depicted as a terrible person who just can't wait to kill all Muslims and flaunts all the laws of god when not doing that. When the movie runs out of Templars to bully it just mutates a Bishop who offered to ransom himself for the common men into someone who wants to flee Jerusalem at the first sign of trouble and just abandon all the citizens to their fate.

 

[Hades]

Here's one: Game of Thrones

I stopped reading the books for just this reason, it's just too relentlessly cruel and violent. Any time anything even remotely good happens to a character it just makes you feel dreadful because you just know it's building towards something far more terrible down the road. There's no hope, no optimism, it's pure unhappy angry and often foul people being angry and foul to each other.

If I want unending cruelty and unhappiness I can examine facets of real life, so no thank you to having that in my fantasy as well. There was just this point mid-way through one of the books where I realized I was just miserable reading it as it was making me feel sad, after realizing that I put the book down and have never touched it since. Haven't seen the show either. Why bother? I already know how it's going to end: Miserably.

I always saw it a little differently in Game of Thrones. That the good guys keep losing doesn't strike me as bad things repeatedly happening to good people but as those same good people purposely setting the stage of their demise for their own self satisfaction. They fail not because Westeros is out to crush the forces of good but because they are poor leaders who place their need above that of their realm.

Ned Stark had everything he needed for his happy ending and he knew taking that happy ending would have avoided a war as well. But Ned cared more about his honor and I recall him stating word for word to Little Finger in the book ''Then we will have war''. So Ned took the stupid option and both Westeros and his own house have suffered from it ever since.

Rob Start could very well have won his war if he was as good a leader as he was a soldier. But holding a vassal committing war crimes hostage to ensure his great amount of troops wouldn't leave wasn't something he could accept to do. He also broke his oath and with it a very useful alliance because he loved someone else. Sure, Rob couldn't predict how far his old father in law would go but he always knew he NEEDED those troops and him walking out on his promised wife looks like him placing his entire kingdom behind his own happiness rather then the other way around. So Rob's kingdom got the short end of the stick.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I've mentioned it in other threads, but I felt that the scene where the assistant got killed in Jurassic World was pure cruelty for the sake of it. I got real uncomfortable watching that, it was so pointlessly mean.

It's also what turned me off on Elfenlied when I saw its first episode. Notably when that random secretary or something got her head twisted off and used as a meatshield. I then turned off the show and never looked back.

Oh and 12 Years A Slave reveled a bit too much in its physical torture as well if you ask me. An excellent movie otherwise.

A similar complaint can be made at the Kingdom of Heaven. That movie just HATES the Christians. If a crusader isn't a time traveling atheist then he's going to be depicted as a terrible person who just can't wait to kill all Muslims and flaunts all the laws of god when not doing that. When the movie runs out of Templars to bully it just mutates a Bishop who offered to ransom himself for the common men into someone who wants to flee Jerusalem at the first sign of trouble and just abandon all the citizens to their fate.

Really? I can only think of one small batch of Christian characters being villanous, and that's the main Templar guys. That bishop was just cowardly which is a different beast entirely. All the other Christian characters, from Liam Neeson's band at the beginning to Jeremy Iron's character and of course the main character, were all pretty awesome. If anything I felt that the movie was real clear in its message that only a minority of Christian crusaders were real "murder all infidel Muslims" type people and that the most of 'em just wanted everyone to live together and somewhat get along.

Mind you, this is going on the Director's Cut. Aka the only cut worth watching. It's been ages since I've watched the theatrical release, I won't be surprised if they fucked around with the characterizations there.

 

[Phasmal]

Eh, I don't enjoy anything that's particularly mean-spirited.

Mostly because I'm not too big on being down on other people and partly because it always strikes me as kinda... hypocritical?
What I mean is, I know quite a few guys who enjoy racist and sexist jokes, and think those who don't should 'get a sense of humour'- and who also don't like the Big Bang Theory because it's making fun of nerds.
Basically, a lot of people enjoy mean-spiritedness until it's targeted at a group they're a part of.