For me, 2 things come to mind; Berserk & the Long Walk
Berserk may sound controversial, but I just didn’t have a good time watching the 90’s anime. I felt angry while watching it. I just didn’t like the characters for how dickish they were (especially Guts & Casica) and the setting was too miserable for me. And some of you may go, “but the comic is 10x better” (I know it’s manga, I’m just calling a comic to piss of people) I also just don’t like dark fantasy in general, since they’re edgy, pretentious, and worst of all… they’re ugly. There’s a reason why I never played the Dark Souls games, outside of the difficulty
The Long Walk movie is really well made movie with amazing acting. But man was it a miserable movie to go through. Seeing all those kids getting shot by soldiers for being slower was painful to watch.
Side note: there’s a lot of critically acclaimed stuff I like (Cowboy Bebop & the Dark Knight). It’s just that entertainment is so subjective that it’s not mutually exclusive to writing.
Nier Automata. The writing is so incredibly self-defeating.
Entire game, all endings
The opening lines of the game, paraphrased, are “Gee, I’m really tired of being brought back to life to fight an infinite war against machines. I wanna kill the guy who invented this cycle.”
Then, the core of the story centers on the tragedy of death, especially of the two immortal main characters dying a few times (once right in the intro). To punctuate how little the writer is reading his own script, the ending is about resurgently bringing the protagonists back to life AGAIN (in an empty world where everything they cared about, aside from each other, is destroyed).
There is, obviously, more to it than that, but character writing is what drives a story for me, and N:A seemed to be just about thrashing 2B/9S around through external events.