Boundaries

I recently stumbled on a serialized webnovel (that I will not name for reasons that willl soon be clear), and got invested. I mean like, invested. I was reading it nonstop, blowing through the first 300,000 or so words (of the total ~1.6m) in about three days.

The characters were quirky, if sometimes missing their specific characterization and instead acting in accordance with the plot rather than their own internal narrative. The story was interesting (think geting dumped into your own D&D game and needing to survive), along with plenty of meta-commentary and humorous bits that kept my interest.

It was about the 300K mark that I realized I was reading a Rationalist novel. I finally twigged after one-too-many cutscenes where one character would word-vomit up a strawman situation only to be Rational-splained about it before I finally picked up on where the weirdness lay. I don't have a problem, per se, with Rationalist content, though in my experience it tends toward boring, repetitive and (often) condescending explanations of questions that no one asked. I'm legitimatley not trying to slag on it, merely giving you my history with it.

It wasn't enough for me to give up on the book, because I was still enjoying myself for the most part and the author seemed to be aware of some of the failings of pure Rationalism (that I have zero desire to discuss further) and specifically noted them.

200K words later, my favorite character had an out-of-character-for-her interaction and promptly died. Sure, it was in service of the plot and, yes, we did have the subsequent Fridging discourse (again, very meta novel). I was very much on the edge of putting the book down. I looked up to see whether the character would be revived (very doable in a LitRPG), and saw that they did come back, which ameliorated my anger somewhat. I was still a bit apprehensive but chose to move on.

Two pages later, the protagonist talked about statutory rape he committed before getting sucked into the game world, and I prompt deleted the book from my ereader.

I wrote out my thought process mostly to show that it was a difficult decision to abandon a sunk cost of 5-600K words read. It felt like something of a waste. But it's important to remember that there are so many good books/TV shows/movies out there, you have absolutely no need to stick with media that for whatever reason (content, authorial dickishness, price increases) you no longer find joy from. It's perfectly acceptable to set media boundaries and enforce them; doing so doesn't make you any less of a fan/reader/viewer.