Asklemmy

Scott's Tots.

Doom 3. I can play it for maybe an hour and a half at a time. I love the game, but it grinds me down.

I didn’t stop it, because I was in a theater, but when Les Mis the movie came out I was at my peak with it as a special interest, so I was very in tune with the film. When Anne Hathaway sang I Dreamed A Dream it was so raw and devastating that I sobbed straight through the next two scenes. This was in a packed theater mind you, and I was sitting next to strangers.

I left the theater and realized I’d had an experience and if I ever watched the movie again it wouldn’t be the same and would diminish the moment I’d just had. And despite my ex-wife trying to get me to watch it again with her I’ve not watched it and never will. That memory is precious and I have gone bit overboard with it 😅

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I've had a lot of bad relationships and honestly feel like I'd be much better off in life if I could just forget them all.

So this movie had me broken to pieces within 30 minutes and I couldn't take any more.

12 Years a Slave, I stopped when they were breaking him. Watching someone go from living their life to suddenly being dehumanized was too awful and terrifying. I was not in the mood to see that.

Voces inocentes. I had family killed in familiar places portrayed in this movie.

Air bud.

I had a golden retriever growing up, and he was the best friend I could have asked for. Seeing the dog in peril (I don't really remember the movie now) was too much, and I lost it.

Irreversible. A French film (alarm bells already) that disturbs me even to this day.

Makes you grateful for your loved ones and how fragile life can be, how one unlucky encounter can flip everything on its head and you may have no influence over any of it.

Difficult viewing for sure and the message shouldn't be to live in fear but to enjoy every good moment you get.

Omori opens with an intense depiction of self-cutting and I noped out right there.

It gets much darker, I'm told. Glad it made the point early; I would not have enjoyed it.

Notice: Some moderate spoilers for the two media sources listed below:

Book: Misery, by Stephen King.

This is a horror story about a bestselling author whose car gets buried in a snowstorm. He's rescued by a huge fan of his, but it turns out the fan is the crazy stalker type, and she keeps the author trapped in her farm house, demanding he write her perfect version of a sequel to his novel series.

I was reading it during class in high school one day and I got to the part about the "hobbling." Anyone who saw the movie version remembers this part as where the crazy lady takes a sledge hammer to the captive author's foot and breaks it at the ankle, effectively hobbling him so he can't run away anymore.

But the book was worse. It was so much worse.

In the book, she takes an axe and cuts his foot off. But because it's a dull rusty axe, it takes her several swings to effectively hack it off, all the while the author is screaming bloody murder, unable to stop this woman from painfully hacking away at his foot. The way Stephen King described the way the axe embedded deep in the author's leg and squeaked on his bones as she dislodged it for another swing... /shudders

I had to set the book down for a moment. My teacher asked me if I was okay, because he said I was suddenly as white as a sheet of paper. When I couldn't find the words to explain what was wrong with me, he told me to go to the nurse. He sent someone to help me walk there, as I was light-headed and wobbly, and having trouble standing on my own. Never in my life have I ever had a book affect me so physically and emotionally in my life, and I'm a huge fan of gory and grotesque horror.

TV show: Season 4 finale of Dexter.

I really enjoyed Dexter, a show about a serial killer who lived by a code and tried to only murder bad people. And my all-time favorite character on the show was his girlfriend, Rita.

When the series began, she was a broken shell of a human being. Which Dexter preferred, because the relationship was simple. She didn't need much affection or attention and was the perfect cover to make him appear to have normal relationships without having to fully commit to someone emotionally.

But as the series went on, Rita became stronger, more capable, and more confident and outspoken. Through a relatively healthy relationship with Dexter, she was learning how to heal and grow as a person. She was even changing Dexter for the better; he found himself feeling attached to her and daydreaming about giving up the serial killer life to settle down and be a good father and husband.

Throughout season 4, Dexter met his match in another serial killer, Arthur Mitchell, who also had a family of his own, except he kept them under his control by fear and intimidation. It was an incredible acting performance by John Lithgow, who up until this point, I had only known as the funny man on 3rd Rock from the Sun. He was absolutely terrifying as a serial killer!

In the season 4 finale, Dexter finally gets his hands on Arthur and dispatches him, as he's done with many other bad people. But the finale twist was that Arthur had gotten his hands on Rita shortly beforehand, and Dexter returns home to find her in the bathtub, murdered.

I was so enraged that they killed off my favorite character that I shut off the TV and never watched another episode of Dexter again. Which was apparently a wise decision, as the show apparently took a nosedive after that season and never recovered. To this day, most fans agree that Dexter ended at season 4.

Walking dead (after rick got kidnapped?)

it was just so depressing and everything went to shit all the time

Fear the walking dead

Same, too depressing and cruel at times

Revenge

At times its ok but you never know when the next depiction of cruelty and emotional abuse hits

The A word

Can only watch it in small doses since the depiction of parents failing is hard if you have abuse history

The last one I still watch but not as the last thing before bed, otherwise I will dream horrible things.

12 Years A Slave.

I was so overwhelmed with revulsion about what was happenning to the main character that I couldn't watch any more of it.

Sons of Anarchy. The show portrays so many people living in ever-increasing states of desperation. One episode ends with a character hanging himself and I almost quit right then and there even though there were multiple seasons left. I had never seen so much depression and crushing desperation portrayed like that. I took a break from it after that episode.

I did finish the show and it was indeed horribly depressing, but incredibly well-done and well-written.

La La Land. I had just been unexpectedly dumped by my anchor partner a few days earlier. Crashed at another partners place and did a bunch of mushrooms, they put the movie on without thinking just trying to fill the time to keep me distracted. The movie about two people having a very sweet relationship then breaking up and not getting back together again was maybe a poor choice lol. We had to stop it part way through so I could ground myself but after a while I did end up pulling it together enough to finish the movie (with some crying breaks here and there). 10/10, would mushroom and watch again. Helped me process tbh, after I knew what I was getting into, very emotionally draining on me though.

Watched Our Planet, season 2 episode 2, and just started weeping uncontrollably when I saw the baby Albatross dying from being fed plastics and other toxic waste. I had to tap out.

Hachi: a Dog Tale

The Last Of Us.

Because it could happen. It's unlikely yes, but all it takes is one lucky mutation and we're done. They were correct in that game, our understanding of fungal infections in humans and our ability to treat it is almost non existent.

We were able to product a vaccine for COVID, a far, far less disruptive illness, within two years (via huge global effort) because we'd been focusing on that area of research for decades very closely and producing similar treatments for a long time already.

But something fungal, and highly contagious? There's nothing we could do except try to quarantine, bomb and napalm every infected area, and hope we got it all.

And we've already seen how an easy to contain illness like COVID simply can't be contained even when we've had a heads up and some time to prepare. It will suddenly explode into the population, and once it's out there it's out there.

Long ago, we used to be protected from extinction due to disease as a species due to our inability to travel long distances to spread it. Now? All it takes is one infected person to spend a few hours at a large airport, and within 48 hours it's reached the doorstep of vast majority of the populated world, and is already behind our best pandemic defences.

If a fungal infection that serious ever does make the leap to humans (which again while unlikely, is also entirely possible, it's like winning the lottery - it could happen tomorrow or maybe never), we have an extremely tiny, almost non existent window in which we must identify how dangerous it is, quarantine the entire region it was located in, bomb it off the face of the earth and hope to the gods we got it all.

But, our morals, humanity and our indecision will stop us from committing what would normally amount to serious war crimes to save the human race, and that tiny window will slip by.

And then we're done.

Is video game media ? If so The Beginner’s Guide really got me ! Had to stop in the middle for a week before going back to it.

I didn't see anyone else mention it, but the scene in King Kong where one of the guys is eaten alive by four or five giant worms, each one starting from a different limb (the last one swallowing his fucking head).

Doesn't matter that they were setting him up for you to root for him to die, it's still way too much for me.

Old yeller.