It’s a kind of post traumatic stress at that point.

Adventures are fun for the readers because they aren’t traumatized by the difficulties and hardships of doing what the characters do. But they want it to be a visceral story, so that the ycan at least share and sympathize with the character’s difficulties. Becoming the character, strapped the chair as they waterboard you, and you can’t do anything about it, because you are watching 24… that’s a little bit “too real” for some sensitive humans. Others maybe like that enough to the point where they will enjoy it, for a time, and then lash out at Bush’s waterboarding tactics as a way to vent and displace their emotional trauma now. That is probably a far more dangerous incident.

Sarah Rolph: That’s a classic problem with the long-arc shows, “24” included. They keep having to top the shocks of the previous season.

I thought I was pretty well desensitized, but I had to stop watching “The Walking Dead” and “Sons of Anarchy” each after six seasons.

Right now I’m watching an old 70s BBC show, “Survivors,” about a post-plague world in which only one person out of several thousand survived. It’s grim, but there is an underlying spirit of optimism that somehow people will survive and rebuild. It’s very different from the current brutal post-apocalyptic fare.

I also like the Tom Selleck “Jesse Stone” mystery series. There’s some violence but mostly it’s psychology and suspense.

We watched the series 24 for a while. It was a well made show, but they kept cranking up the violence, making it more and more realistic and disturbing. I stopped watching, maybe not soon enough. I started noticing that when I watched that show I a visceral, physical reaction — it pumped up the adrenaline big-time. I guess people enjoy that feeling. I guess I enjoyed it for a while, but then it became too much — the stimulation turned to stress. As someone said above, there’s enough of that in the real world.

We watched the series Bones for a while; you know how it is, you get drawn in by the characters and it becomes a habit. That show always had a predictably disgusting scene in the opening and a few more of them in the beginning. For a while it was a formula so it was fairly easy to know when to look away. Then they started playing gotcha, showing disgusting images when you least expected it. I stopped watching.

I am more desensitized than I want to be. I don’t know if it’s reversible, but I am trying to keep it from getting any worse (or, better, depending on how you look at it…)

If you are really interested in the Games of Thrones in actual history,
read the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1130479583910928385.html

Well, that’s not gonna happen with Martin and GoT. Too much money. Too late too.

Martin’s channeling of Game of Thrones is part god complex, part deus ex machina, and part writer’s pride. I don’t know where he got it from but Lord of the Rings, unlikely.

“I guess I’ve become desensitized. I saw Ridley Scott’s “Alien” the day it first hit the theaters. …I got “The Texas Chainsaw Murders” in outer space. …
Afterward I was shaken and horrified. In fact I half-expected there would be a nation-wide campaign against the film. But nothing.
Since then I’ve seen “Alien” several times and it no longer bothers me. I love Big Brother.

LOL. Only the first “Alien” made any sense.

The rest were “rigged” to produce the marketable screen result: full of sweaty cursing screaming and even clownish imbeciles going where they should not, in order that they might be predictably eviscerated by the monster. Whatever happened to the “neutron bomb”? Oh yeah they were trying to capture an all powerful, indestructible, acid bleeding monster that moves at the speed of light, survives airless zero-pressure and temperature environments, and only lives to mount and impregnate your face. So hurry up and climb right into that suspicious air vent while carrying a Zippo lighter for protection.

I’m embarrassed for Ridley Scott. He’s still stuck using chiaroscuro lighting and jump cuts in place of an intelligible plot with rational actor motivation.

As far as Game of Thrones goes, I many, many, years ago lost patience with watching movies I had no real interest in, just in order to see the flash of a bare tit as an actress showered.

The idea of sitting though an hour or more of boring, if raging, yelping idiots, gruesome murders, and repulsive perverts and dwarves having sex, for even less promised reward nowadays, is a transaction I’m unwilling to enter into.