Like books that got very popular but you never really could get into.
Hyperion Cantos. The beginning was incredibly promising but then it all went to hell with the magic Mary Sue type girl that deflated any stakes to zero and one of the most insufferable baffoons for the main character. Ah yes and the romance between those two was an actual joke, one-dimensional, unjustified and kinda creepy. By the end of the series I was seriously pissed off at the author for squandering all of the potential.
Girl with Dragon Tattoo. Read it, put it down and went huh. Didn’t grab me, didn’t really like anyone in the book. At the time everyone was talking about how awesome it was and I was just like, really? This book?
Ready Player One
That one is generational I think. It isn’t going to hit all your childhood nostalgia buttons if you weren’t born by about 1985.
I was the target audience. I got all or almost all of the references, I just thought the book was awful.
Most of the romantacy recs on booktok are hugely overhyped. Like, yeah, 4th Wing was more readable than others, but it wasn’t super addictive or anything.
I find recs in general hard because readers tend to over-rely on tropes making something good. But a good read needs a delicious trope and decent writing. I can’t do without either
Where the Crawdads Sing. The main mystery was predictable, the writing was nothing special and neither were the characters. After I read it I was kinda stumped why I had been seeing it everywhere.
There’s a lot of demand for things that are unoffensive and easy to digest. I just watched Gran Turismo because the audience ratings on RottenTomatoes are so high. It’s…terrible. Doesn’t even qualify as being cheesy good. It’s just so superficial and predictable, more like watching a TV commercial than a movie. But apparently there’s a segment of the population who really love that vibe