Why I've stopped watching all but one of the "Arrowverse" shows (Part 1): (Warning:Spoilers for part of the most recent season of Flash)
I did watch Arrow through its end because I knew it would lead us through Crisis on Infinite Earths, which I knew should be a good time.
However, most seasons' plots are repeats of the first season's plot and there's only so many times that can be interesting. Couple that with the two Star City futures (one pre, one post Crisis) we see both being bleak and it just doesn't give me hope for the planet.
The Flash suffered from the same repetition as Arrow, with the writers being unsure how to challenge Flash without the villain being a speedster. The few times they deviated, they made more interesting plotlines, but also drug them out (as American TV tends to do) to the point of plot weariness. The most recent season making the villains be Forces (with, I think, the Big Bad as the Speed Force itself as the last reveal before I was pretty much done) feels like the writers have nowhere to go with these characters. It's got another season coming and I'm just sitting here like HOW?!
Why I stopped watching all but one of the Arrowverse shows (Part 2):
(Warning: Spoilers for the most recent season of Supergirl)
This is just about Supergirl.
The first season was on another network and it didn't start off great. It was hard to care for most of the characters that first season (and they did weird things like avoid using Superman's name). I think there was a Brainiac but not the Brainiac 5 that joins the show later. Once it moved to the CW, it did improve, but that was short-lived.
Problem one is that they were so busy trying to create "girl Superman" that they never address the literal fuck-ton of trauma Kara must have.
Like ever. We never see her in therapy, she never brings up what it was like to watch her homeworld explode as a tween only to be trapped in a literal void of timeless despair for what must have been 20 years. They mention that it happened, but there's no addressing how that would make Kara a different type of person, alien refugee, or hero than Kal-El's experience. Nope, she's just the Paragon of Hope (literally per Crisis).
I don't mind the political stances the show made, but, again (an American TV problem I mentioned before) the plots are so drawn out and so pulled from current human rights battles that the show stops being an escape from reality. If fucking Supergirl can't convince the alt-right that alien refugees are people who deserve to live on this planet then there's no fucking way we'll ever be able to deal with our own dunderheads who think any type and number of minorities should be removed from our country if not the planet.
I actually like Jon Cryer's Lex Luthor.
I know he gets a lot of hate, but he's the first live-action Lex I've watched successfully manipulate whole nations and that's a thing Lex is known for: genius, manipulation and hubris, all of which Cryer's portrayal gives us in spades.
What I don't like is being saddled with him beyond his expiration date. We did not need him to manipulate Crisis so that Lena's murder of him is not only undone, but his previous misdeeds are erased as well. Just so he can be a "bigger" bad the next season. And the thing is, he's really not a bigger bad, he has no tarnish and some political clout but his manipulations that season were so obvious that there was no "reveal". It wasn't fun to watch.
Then there is the Dreamer problem.
I love Dreamer. I love her story (and that a trans character is played by a trans actress), and the reality of being in a relationship with a neuroatypical person like Brainy.
All of that is great. What I hate is that the writers have decided that "dream energy" equals her powers being "whatever is convenient to get out of or into whatever situation" there is very little development of where her powers started off at: dreaming the near future and she consistently struggles with interpreting her visions despite having apparently grown so powerful she can unzip a football field and hide a timeship beneath it. Like...she can't do the basic stuff but she learned fucking fireball from the back of a spellbook? I really want to know the logic behind her powers.
And so we get to the most recent season in which they decided to send Supergirl to the Phantom Zone
where of course she finds her father, because bad writing and we spend several episodes trying to get her back to the point where they decide time travel is necessary to get her DNA to track her(rather than, you know, seeing if there are any shed hairs in her apartment, or hacking the government database that should have backups of DEO files from the several times Kara was injured)
and the whole "arc" is feeling like shitty anime filler episodes.
And so I was done.
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