You’re completely free to drop something if you don’t like it or don’t care enough to completely consume it, but your opinion on it doesn’t matter if you haven’t experienced the whole thing as it was intended and can judge the pieces in the full context
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Dude Where’s my Car.
Where do you stand on food, OP?
Do I need to eat all of this piece of shit before I can deliver an informed opinion? Or just the first bite?
Opinion: It wasn’t good enough to finish.
If your thing couldn’t be bothered to be good enough to be finished it’s shit.
if some media is good I should be enjoying the majority of it, not just the ending
This opinion is dumb. I read all of it and didn’t like it. This has the same fucked up, stupid energy as telling me that because I’m a straight, white, man, I don’t get to have an opinion on abortion even though I agree with it. Just dumb.
I think it depends, on how much watched of it or read.
For instance, if you only watched 1 episode of a show that has 200 episodes, than yes i would agree that the opinion does not really count, but if you watched 100 episodes out of 200 i think the opinion counts.
Or you read 10 pages of a book with a 1000 pages, than yes the opinion does not really count, but if its 500 pages out of 1000 i think it counts.
When it comes to movies, personally i can for the most part, tell if i am going to like a movie within the first 15-20 minutes.
I don’t think this is a black and white things.
I wouldnt say it doesnt count but it is definitely regarded less favorably
Your opinion doesn’t count then
I get what you’re saying but not to that extent. It depends on how far they got, or what they found out about it they made them stop
Id just say that their opinion on it may be valid, but their critique of it would not.
So basically, you’re assuming a novel with 499 pages full of badly written bullshit can always be saved on page 500? Cool. Wish I was that optimistic.
Actually it depends how much of it was left to watch/read
I don’t need to watch past season 3 of Riverdale to know it’s gone from “okay, this is cool” to “wtf is this clusterfuck.. at least the actors are hot”.
If it had so bad beginning I couldn’t finish it – my opinion absolutely counts
I mean, the fact I didn’t deem something worthy of finishing is surely sufficient as far as opinions go? I’m not writing a review on it
What if it was so terrible you couldn’t stand to finish it, like “Oppenheimer”?
I would argue it’s entirely dependent on how much you watched/read/etc.
You give up ten minutes into a 2-hour movie? Yeah, I would argue your opinion isn’t valid. You’re not really giving it a fair shot.
You give up 70 minutes into a 90 minute movie because it’s so bad you literally can’t force yourself to watch another second? Nah, I think you can have a valid opinion. You watched over half of it and didn’t get any better. The chance it somehow is magically fixed in the final twenty minutes is borderline zero.
I’ve forced myself to sit through the entire of enough bad movies. I cannot recall a single instance where a movie that was awful a half-hour before the ending was suddenly great by the time the credits rolled.
I mean, this isn’t an unpopular opinion, but I can see where you’re going from or coming from. I have stopped reading a book and stop watching a TV show before the end and then still gives me the right to say that it’s shit.
I finished the book and yh, it was bad.
“Why would you read the whole thing if you didn’t like it?!”
So if I want to say that One Piece is not for me and it’s not perfect, I have to watch all episode and not just the first 20 or so ? Yeah no.
Best not work as a professional reader at a publishing house, then.
Well I still did not care for The Godfather.
If it can’t get me to the end of it… it’s not worth finishing…
Huge agree. People here are arguing for media that was so bad they did not finish it, which is valid, but that should not count as a complete and well thought out critique of said media. Quite frankly, I don’t care about someone’s book report on Harry Potter when they read the first couple pages and decided it wasn’t for them.
To double down, most people aren’t Gordan Ramsay, having a single bite of food and being able to tell where the ingredients came from and the experience level of the chef. In reality, they’re laymen who had a single bite of food, shook their head, and said “nuh uh” while pushing the plate away. It’s completely valid, but is not a substantive critique.
It’s at the same level as reading a couple brief comments, refusing to comment back for elaboration, and instead writing an essay in my own comment as to why others are wrong, which is something I would clearly never do
Disagree. If it’s too boring to even get into, that’s my opinion.
Lol i mean im not going to waste my rime reading or watching something i dont enjoy.
I dont need to know how it ends if its too bad to finish.
Also why do you need to know the ending for an opinion. I dont know of any media that was saved by its ending.
Do you have examples of this?
Wrong.
I mean, the opinion is valid, it just needs to be understood with the context that they didn’t finish it.
If they got through half of a book and it absolutely bored them to tears, that’s a valid opinion. And you now know, while they didn’t finish it, and there might be redeeming quality at the end, the first half was not good for them.
I know Jurassic World sucks because 20 minutes in the plot was about using dinosaurs in the military . I didn’t need to finish it to know it was one of the dumbest plots I’d ever seen in film
Hard disagree.
I haven’t finished Breaking Bad, and stopped watching part way through season 4.
People said you have to wait till it gets good, but I feel 3 seasons is enough of a go to know it’s not for me and can definitely have an opinion.
My opinion is, it’s not for me. It’s definitely an amazing show for others. I’ve recommended it to a few friends and it’s their favourite show.
If I had 99% of a book I’m allowed to have an opinion. Especially if I read it slowly and digest every word (I make a point to slow down my reading and think about every word). My opinion is worth more than someone who speed reads a book in a day
Didn’t read the full thread text, but I disagree
This is wrong. Because then, you couldn’t give an opinion about anything ongoing.
I disagree. If you didn’t finish it, it’s because you thought it wasn’t good. That’s an opinion all on its own, and absolutely still counts
I agree and disagree.
I think for TV shows, it’s fine – because it’s delivered in episodes, an episode is a full experience that you can form an opinion on.
But if you didn’t finish a movie, you didn’t experience the whole work. I get that it’s fair to criticise a film for being so bad you couldn’t finish it. That’s fair. But when it comes down to specific criticism and talking about the shape of the whole movie, the story etc. – you really can’t offer anything of value if you haven’t seen the whole thing.
And some movies are saved by their endings. I was mild on The Shape of Water until the final seconds of it. I liked it fine but >! her scars becoming gills !< changed my entire experience and really elevated that movie into something I really liked.
Likewise, I think Rogue One is a dull movie until the last 30-40 minutes (maybe my opinion will change if I rewatch it after Andor). I think it’s a loved movie because it has a strong ending and leaves you on a high. If you walked out before then, you can’t really speak to what the whole movie is like and may have an incorrectly negative perception of it.
I agree with this to a point. You are certainly welcome to share your opinion on good, bad, and ugly, however, I think your recommendation power should be severely limited if you did not complete all available content (in your specific field of interest i.e. you saw the movie, you don’t have to read the book).
That being said, if your opinion is I’m not interested in watching the story of a pedophile and I don’t like how this story glorifies pedophilia in these first few chapters/episodes/etc I think your opinion should count because you shouldn’t be forced to continue something you don’t like just so you can share your opinion. I do think (although in the scenario I mentioned it would be super gross) that if there is some grandiose meaning that is laid out and cashed on, you wouldn’t “get it” if you stopped early on. I guess for me, it will depend on how far someone got.
TWD is the perfect example for why it’s a bad take. Why sit around watch it all if it’ll get just worse from like the 8th season at most anyway. There’s a good reason why people won’t finish something. Avoidance and abandonment is a clear and rightful answer to bad quality.
I’ll approach this from a different angle. I suppose by this logic authors shouldn’t ever ask for critique on one or two chapters of a story at a time. They better write their story in full and then their critique group must read it in full before offering any input or their opinions just don’t count.
Of course that’s ridiculous and readers can offer critique on the part of the story they’ve read. In fact it’s great criticism to know when someone would have dropped the book and for what reason.
I feel it’s best to avoid any opinion aside from “this didn’t resonate with me for XYZ reason”.
I can determine feces with a glance. I don’t have to sift through it and examine every peanut or piece of corn.
“You need to finish it to have a proper understanding of it!”
“Why did you finish it if you don’t like it!?”
It really all depends. You watched the first episode and you didn’t like it, but you think that the person who is looking for suggestions would.
I like video games, but I don’t have to finish a game to enjoy my time with it.
I hate it when people say the beginning is slow, you’ve gotta get like 20 hours in to really get into it.
Sounds like a waste of time to me.
If I am not hooked by a show/game/movie after a reasonable amount of time, I’m not going to continue wasting my time when there are plenty of other things to enjoy.
Example: the 2nd thor movie. 20 minutes in i was bored out of my mind. Not finishing it.
Unpopular indeed. I for one think that people can form opinions on unfinished media in terms of their own perception but not critique or recommend it on the basis of those perceptions.
The thing is you can’t win.
You didn’t like something so didn’t finish it – your opinion doesn’t count as you didn’t give it a chance and follow through
You didn’t like something and finished it anyway – well if you didn’t like it why did you continue with it
The first 10 minutes of poor things were so bad I honestly don’t want to know if it gets better later on. This is the only movie that I didn’t fully watch and I’ve watched a lot of bad movies.
So because you haven’t seen every single episode of home and away, you’re not entitled to say whether or not it’s a good show?
To be honest, if someone doesn’t finish it that’s a review by itself. And its not a very good one.
But yeah, there are situations where it matters. I remember for example Babylon V, I was specifically told season one is ok but only after it it becomes great and yeah, it did and it was well worth it and I’m glad I had that information.
This is pretty ridiculous, especially for shows. If there are 8 seasons and I can’t stand getting through the first season I will still tell people I couldn’t get past the first season.
What if it just want enjoyable enough for me to finish? Doesn’t my opinion count if it was so unbearable to me I turned it off? Like I gave it a fair shot and hated it. That’s a fair stance I think
Fair, but I didn’t finish the Lord of the Rings for a reason.
YMS fuming right now
Agree, unless your opinion is “it was too boring to finish” whenever I’m going through a new album from an artist I like, I’ll listen to the first half of the song before skipping it. If I’m not hooked in the first half it’s probably not gonna get better
saying “it was so boring i lost interest and didn’t finish” is also an opinion and it’s absolutely valid. i’m not going to do an analysis of the thing but if you think that the creators don’t consider the opinion of people who found their work too boring to finish as valuable feedback you’re dead wrong.
It sucks so much I could not even finish it is an opinion.
So the people who told me One Man One Jar is terrible to watch lied to me!
If we even consider the concept of “valid/invalid” opinions, the whole idea of an opinion falls apart.
Not finishing it counts as an opinion.
Ah damn guess I’ll have to watch all 1126 episodes of One Piece just to form an opinion about it
What if I think your opinion doesn’t count either way?
Nah. If the show is bad enough to drop then my opinion is that it had no qualities that would make me want to finish it.
How is that invalid opinion? Life is too short to torture yourself consuming subpar media just so you could have “valid opinion” on it.
I don’t think that there is any show that I’d hate the entire time and then it made me love it in the last episode. If there is about 3 or more consecutive hours that don’t make me interested into the show in any way, then the show is bad.
Your opinion on bad food doesn’t count if you didn’t eat the entire plate.
yeah, LOL, sure “you can’t judge a person unless you marry em and die of old age with em”
If I’ve read half a book and can list a bunch of reasons for why I didn’t like it, I still get an opinion. If i think half the book stinks, the second half is not going to improve my perception of the book.
Meh, as long as youre up front thst you didnt finish it i think an opinion on something matters more on why they didnt finish it. Its completely valid to have your critique be “it wasnt good enough to keep me interested” if something is only good at the end then its not good
I still think Atlas Shrugged sucks
I will agree to disagree.
If I didnt finish the content it is most likely b/c it sucked. Otherwise why wouldn’t I have finished it?
Hard disagree. If something is bad that I don’t want to finish, that speaks to its’ quality. Hell, you don’t even have to start something to have an opinion on it. I shouldn’t have to give money to shitty author in order to be allowed to have an opinion on their shitty work. I don’t need to read The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf to have the opinion that they’re awful. I didn’t have to sit through all of Holmes & Watson to know it wasn’t worth watching.
Everyone is free to have their opinions on things. You have the PERSONAL option to disregard the opinion of someone who didn’t finish the book/movie/show (I’m not sitting through 72 hours just to have the right to think FRIENDS was shit), but you don’t get to decide whose opinion other people will value.
I can’t actually think of a book that I had a strong opinion of halfway through that made me change my mind by the end. I’m not really capable of not finishing books unless there’s special circumstances (dropped my copy of catch-22 50 feet the first time I read it so I didn’t finish it for six months until I found another copy, could not read more than two pages of Naked Lunch because the book smelled like acid) but like. The book was bad in the beginning, it’s going to be bad in the end whether or not you finish it.
I do wish I’d put some books down halfway through though. I did not need to finish the 1977 wannabe gothic horror novel set in South Africa and written by a white man. I could have done without that.
If I have two buddies and I ask them about a movie and one says “Saw it all, didn’t care for it” and one said “I walked out of that shit within the first hour”, I’m definitely going to be much, much more interested in the second’s opinion.
Etc I think you forgot video games…
However some video games take 80+ hours to complete, and double the time if you go for all the achievements, subquests, side content etc.
You are telling me after 10 hours you don’t deserve to have an opinion???
Same applies to books, movies, shows…. Trust me I watched hundreds of episodes of Naruto and still don’t like it.
if you need to finish it to have an opinion, then it’s a bad story. because stories should have their message spread instead of just giving it all at the end in a packaged form.
i haven’t watched battlestar galactica 4th season because i felt like it began to fall apart. now it was a fairly well written show and it spread its message throughout the seasons and told me many things around its core themes. i don’t need to know if they really found the earth at the end, who cares? i don’t know how the show ends but i would end it with the fleet flying deep into space and into the unknown without clarification on their fate. because the very ambiguity of their fate is the propellent which drives the story forward.
so what im saying is good stories are structured around not the events or situations but rather the “concepts” these events and situations represent. but if we were talking about a sherlock novel then what you’re saying would be much more meaningful. because sherlock novels are not “good” stories really, they are just entertainment and don’t really have a message. the events and situations are at the very center because they are not analyzed on a conceptual level. if character X is acting weird and i just quit at the half of it, i may criticise it by saying “character X is weird and makes no sense”. but maybe character X is the killer and that’s why he’s been acting weird all along.
Eh.
The Wheel of Time is one of my favorite book series. I’ve read the whole thing (all 14 books and 4.4 million words of it) at least four or five times. The first six books, I’ve read 10-12 times each.
It took me three attempts to get past the first 100 pages of the first book. And it really takes three books before the real story starts.
I think someone is missing out if they bug out early, but I also can’t begrudge someone who doesn’t want to suffer through something they don’t like because they might like it more later on. If someone told me, “Yeah, I started reading, and it was just too long-winded for me,” I couldn’t say their opinion was invalid. Some critiques wouldn’t be fair, but fundamentally I couldn’t really tell them that they were wrong to drop the books.
Life is too short to waste on doing things you don’t like.
There are so many movies where I’m 2/3 of the way through and I realize that I don’t care at all what happens to these people because there’s been no character development so I just stop watching. But I agree with your premise,
I’m sure theres a lot of people out there that didn’t read Hitler’s mein kampf book but can just sense that its probably trash. A lot of media is like that…If you know who wrote it and produced it, you don’t need to read it or watch it to know its just trash.
Wrong I say 50% of a movie needs to be good in order for it to be considered half decent for a show i give it 3 episodes or so
Try and watch the movies Druids and get back to me.
Eh. Some things are so bad not being able to finish them is an opinion.
I watched 9 seasons of Grey’s anatomy. I have enough information on which to base my opinions.
Disagree.
I don’t need to watch all of Iron Fist to tell that I don’t like it and that it’s bad.
if i take a bite of shit, do i really have to eat the whole pile to know it is shit? or can i just go oh wow thats shit and stop?
For some things I can agree but sometimes you know something is bad and you don’t need to finish it.
If I buy a book I’ll do my best to read all of it, but sometimes the writing is just genuinely bad. And sure art is subjective, but I’ve read books that were so poorly edited they had multiple spelling errors and glaring plot holes. I wouldn’t have needed to finish those to know they were bad (the only reason i did was bc my coworker and I hate read it together).
I watched all the way to the end and her stepbrother never got her unstuck out of the dryer
wrong. it wasnt good enough to finish. or, you could make some insane claim such as “you missed 30 seconds of one episode of star trek deep space nine? all your opinions are invalid” or something.
“the Simpsons fucking sucks now, I haven’t watched a single episode since season 9”
This seems ridiculous to me, because it would mean that no one would be allowed to have opinions on any media that is currently airing. Stranger Things is due to put out their final season later this year but it’s been a part of the culture since July of 2016. Are you really intending to say that no person on Earth can have an opinion about this show that’s been one of the most popular franchises for nine years because none of us have finished it yet? What about the Game of Thrones books? They’ve been going since 1996. 29 years, but I understand we’re still waiting on the next (last?) book in the series. Is no one allowed to have opinions on that either?
I had to rent Primer three times just so I could say that movie sucked ass.
I didn’t finish the Eternals and am 100% sure it’s awful.
Personally – for my favourite books, tv series or movies, I will sometimes not finish the last chapter or two. If I never finished the last chapter, then in my mind nothing bad happened and I can imagine a happier ending. Ex: Game of thrones last season (I didn’t watch the last two episodes).
I would still however say that I have read a certain book —- with the addition of adding I haven’t read the ending.
I don’t do this all the time, just on series that I know upset some people or were sad.
I didn’t have to finish all of The Walking Dead to say that that show declined each season.