Why do we revisit stories that we never even liked to begin with?

Why do we revisit stories that we never even liked to begin with?

The glory of hate-watching… chances are, you’ve done this at least once. Hate-watching isn’t limited to film or television, though, it can be applied to any story content you can expose yourself to. It’s usually that thing you don’t want to admit you’re doing, but also can’t untangle from your thoughts completely.

In case you’re already thinking, “What? Me? No, I’d never do such a thing!” and don’t want to admit you ever do this, I’ll just give you some examples of my own hate-watching.

Audiobooks/books: the Twilight series… I really dislike all of the immature and unhealthy interactions between the main characters in these books. The Cullen family’s backstories are brief but much more interesting than the rest of the books. Midnight Sun – Twilight from Edward’s point of view – provides a little bit more to relate to for these horrible characters, but really, aside from the interesting vampire backstories, these books have no redeeming qualities. They’re not well-written: Stephanie Meyer says “chagrin” and “reaction” more times than probably everyone else in the world has ever and will ever say them combined. The main characters are toxic and there’s nobody to really care deeply about who gets any real story time. And yet, I relisten to these audiobooks at least once every couple years since the vampire surge in the first decade of 2000. A big problem I have in general is that I, as a storyteller myself, get very excited about the potential of a story, so if it turns out poorly, I can sometimes hold a grudge. In the Twilight series, this seems to mean that I will relisten to it and switch between disapproval and searching for some missed redeeming factor. Also, and less relatedly, I use these to fall asleep just as much as I am listening to find some redemption in them.

Games: League of Legends… Full disclosure, I have not played competitively in several years and I haven’t played casually in probably a year at least now. But I have definitely played thousands of games of League even though I was rarely enjoying it. I wasn’t interested in MOBA games so much prior to 2013, but then friends were playing and the competitive part of me thought, I can do that! And that’s really all it took to get started. Years of my life later, it took a long time to uncouple from the toxic relationship probably every player finds themselves in once they pass the threshold between casually playing a few games every so often and playing ranked. The toxicity among other players and the requirement of playing with others in a game that everyone just gets obscenely angry or nasty. I spent so many hours just chasing the feeling of getting a team that didn’t troll or flame paired with a game where everyone on my team was on their best game and having that unicorn scenario happen super rarely just kept me coming back angrily spending more time playing. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of League games where I was enjoying my time spent, but as the seasons moved forward and the popularity and toxicity of the game’s community changed, it really got out of hand.

Movies: Really bad scary movies… This whole category is a sort of cop-out for me as an example, because I also like really good scary movies, but there are so few of them. I have rewatched a few of these, but mostly the “hate-watching” aspect is finding things that have terrible reviews and watching them while making fun of them. Sometimes, poorly rated “scary movies” turn out to have been fun and interesting or even succeed at being “scary” for me. But, usually, I watch these with a desire to poke fun at and judge with wild abandon.

Television: The Vampire Diaries and The 100… Interestingly, The CW has gotten far more of my attention than I’d have ever guessed. I stopped watching lots of television when I was still pretty young and realized that there were so many commercials between the previous segment of Ducktales and the afternoon lineup like Goof Troop that I couldn’t remember what story I was waiting to return to. However, The Vampire Diaries began in 2009 right as I started graduate school at USC and while my course work was ramping up, I found myself looking for something to watch and recalling many advertisements for The Vampire Diaries. I was already hate-reading Twilight by then and figured that somebody must be able to tell vampire stories that don’t go off the rails (I’d also been reading and then watching the Sookie Stackhouse novels – HBO’s True Blood – which started out good and then disappointed me) and that I didn’t have time for a series binge. The first few episodes had some potential to be interesting, in spite of the obvious teen and tween audience, so I watched an episode a week. After several months, I realized I was looking forward to watching and judging the show for being so incredibly bad. I ended up watching all eight seasons and even the first spin-off, The Originals (which I also hate-watched all of). I started watching The 100 after several seasons were already available because I spotted it on Netflix and the description made it look interesting. I realized it was a CW show after I already wanted to know all the secrets of this terrible tween show’s universe. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you the series finale seven seasons later did not reverse my hate-watching… but there I was, still watching it!

Theme Parks: Disney Parks: It’s a Small World… I actually have not ridden on this in quite some time to save myself from the perpetual earworm, but this is definitely one of the best examples of a ride that I have gone on in spite of not liking. It’s interesting, because I tend to like puppets and songs and characters, but something about “It’s a Small World Ahhhhhhftuh All” for the billionth time completely undoes the magic it should be. The ride isn’t even poorly done, something I would be relentlessly upset about, because it isn’t like any of the intricate little details can malfunction and the ride is entirely different (like if the Na’vi Shaman malfunctions and gets removed from the Na’vi River Journey ride in Animal Kingdom). Surely we could argue that some of the characters are stereotyped and we could dismantle the history of this ride for a long time, but none of that would be the real reason why I hate-ride this ride. The reason I would hate-ride Small World is because it’s technically sound, one of the originals, a classic, and the long history of success is inspirational. 

But why do we do this? What does this provide for us?

Stories of all sorts – anything we are exposed to – help to shape us. They filter into our dreams, they live “rent-free” in our minds, they have an affect on the words we choose to use in our everyday conversations. So why would we want to introduce into our lives something that we don’t like and probably seems like a waste of time?

Squandered Potential

Bella and Edward are horrible main characters that I can never root for and don’t care about… but Twilight became sensationally popular and I still years later find myself occasionally revisiting, hoping that I’ll be able to find something more appealing or redeeming to pair with the very interesting different type of vampire Stephanie Meyer crafted and then quickly turned into tween trash. Long lives and histories of characters who are complex and struggle with goodness or otherness can be quite fascinating and some of the details of Meyer’s vampires are that they never sleep but sparkle in the sun, which would give away their otherness. That bit of this fantasy world is incredibly interesting. The stuff that gets focused on, however, is just not that. League of Legends has so much potential to be a fun and enjoyable game to stomp competitors in, but almost never delivers on that potential.

Curiosity

All of these things share something in getting to the end of the content – the completionist in everybody can sometimes take over and sometimes you just need to know what happens next no matter how terrible and stupid it’s been so far. The Vampire Diaries and The 100, like Twilight, had interesting hooks, especially The 100, which is a sci-fi future world that conceptually is right up my alley, and then every time it kept failing to be any good, I still wanted to know the rest.

Technical Excellence

This applies to so many things… even Twilight could arguably be labeled as technical excellence – the books sold zillions of copies and had five movies and even spin-off books and merchandising that dominated for years. However, I’d say that the real examples of this are classic novels you were set to read in school that you just Did Not Like. It’s part of why I tried and failed to get into the book of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, House of Seven Gables, and Brave New World, just to name a few. The first two are books I have repeatedly tried to get into, because I enjoyed television and film adaptations so much, and just couldn’t. The second two were required reading and I am still, many years later, salty about having to try to get through them for school. Citizen Kane, a film that even my terribly assorted film analysis classes played for us, is one of film’s most famous examples of technical excellence. I hated it, but there’s technical excellence in a subject I obviously do like and care about and so, I found myself needing to know and remember and look at examples of this excellence even though I was miserable about it. Sometimes that can train your brain just a little bit to feel you need to do/watch/experience the thing even though you don’t want to and the result might be like mine where I consume tons of stuff I don’t even like.

We are always learning and interacting with something every day. If you sat in a box devoid of anything else all day, you’d still have your thoughts. What we interact with sparks interest, joy, sadness, or understanding in us all the time, even when we aren’t thinking about it. I think hate-watching tends to mix both things that are good for us (it’s a “classic” or “well crafted”) and things that are laughable or disappointing (to let off steam by judging a story or experience rather than blowing up one’s own life with negative behavior) to satisfy our human need for expressing disgust, fears, and anger in a safe way.

So… it’s totally fine that I listened to the audiobook of Midnight Sun this past week.

Maybe take a minute today to consider what some of your hate-watches are and which one you’ll be using next time you want to let off some steam. Happy October!