which is worse?

[kaigou]

Poll #5852

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 70

View Respondents

When reading/watching a story, which is the MOST painful, frustrating, or annoying for you?

View Answers

A well-written story focused on a topic/theme that you usually find boring.
5 (7.1%)

A badly-written story focused on a topic/theme that you usually find interesting.
65 (92.9%)

Comments

[dancing_serpent]

I am prepared to suffer through bad writing at least to a certain degree of painfulness if the topic/theme interests me, even if I hit the back button after only a chapter or so - but I wouldn't even have clicked on the well-written one with the boring topic/theme.

[kaigou]

The question actually came up when I was complaining bitterly about a drama that's got a theme I usually love, while CP was stuck reading several really well-written essays... on a topic that holds no interest for him. The current consensus between us is that his experience is boring, but not nearly as frustrating/aggravating as my version, and I was wondering if it's true for others, as well.

[dancing_serpent]

Being bored is very frustrating/aggravating/annoying for me. You could say I'm more patient with bad writing than with boredom.

E. A. Waite would have been proud.

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

Here's the flipside: turgid writing on an interesting subject, from Marilyn Ivy's book on Japan and modernity ('Discourses of the Vanishing'):

"The attempt to represent the communally intimate through the publicity of the televisual apparatus, for example, configures the paradoxes already attendant on the reversal of the public and the private, the outside and the interior. Intimacy is stretched to cover the entire reach of all Japanese . . . what could be more intimate than the telepathies of the holonic society?"

Supplementarily to the originating essayist's obscurantist fetishicizing thesaurism, it isn't even (IMHO) an accurate statement.

[leorising]

I'm the same.