My Limit

For some odd reason, before I drifted off to sleep last night, I thought of the TV show Gotham. I loved it when it first started. Dark. Moody. Filled with conflict. And I watched it every week for quite a while.

And then, there was a storyline that took Jada Pinkett-Smith, who was a badass, to some weird place where she’d been kidnapped, and they used people to supply body parts for people who had enough money to pay for them. I watched that one episode, and it disturbed me so much, I erased the show from my “watch” list, and I never looked at it again. There are just some things that go too far for me. It makes me uncomfortable to follow them.

It’s not always something disturbing that turns me off. I might start a book where the writing’s so flat, I can’t hang in there and move to something new. The protagonist might be so stupid that I want to hit in her head because she doesn’t have a brain anyway. Or the mood might be so depressing, I feel like I should take a Valium to finish the book. There are many, many reasons that I give up on a storyline. And just like me, I’m sure everyone else has their own “enough is enough” moments in a story.

What turns you off? What makes you give up on a book and go on to the next one?