== Looming doom generally hurts my enjoyment of a show

Here's something that I've not so much discovered as realized recently:
I generally don't really enjoy a show where there's doom looming over the
characters. This was a factor in [[my initial reaction to *Symphogear*
SymphogearRerated]] and it's come up again this season in *Mobile Suit
Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans*.

It's not that I'm opposed to character death (although [[certain forms
of it turn me off CharacterDeathViews]]) or that I require happy endings
from my shows. I think it's perfectly okay to kill characters, even
in casual ways, provided that it fits the show and the mood. What's
different about a show with doom looming over things is exactly that
there is doom looming over things. If I know some of the characters
are going to die, I can't watch the show without wondering who it is
and when it's going to happen. Is it going to be this episode, this
next scene? When is the knife going to be jammed in and twisted?
One of the common effects of this for me is to devalue much of the work
the show is doing to develop characters. Actually caring about doomed
characters feels somewhere between wasted effort and falling for the
show's emotional manipulation, which irritates me. And when I don't
know who's doomed when, well, pretty much all of the characters get
affected.

So on the whole, a show with looming doom winds up being kind of a strain
to watch. There is a constant tension and worry in the background that
I don't like; it's simply wearying.

Despite this I think that shows can have looming doom and still work.
While I don't have fully formed thoughts on how yet, [[my incomplete
thoughts https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/665386022755303424]]
are that an important ingredient is for the show itself to acknowledge
the looming doom by having it affect the shape of the story and the
characters. In this I contrast *Sidonia* and *Iron-Blooded Orphans*.
*IBO* is has relatively consistently ignored the doom looming over
the cast, with essentially no sign of it in the story, while *Sidonia*
embraced it in the atmosphere of the show and even the character reactions
from relatively early. As a result this aspect of *Sidonia* worked for me
and did not get me down, whereas watching *IBO* remains partly wearying
and tense in an unpleasant way.

(An interesting question is whether I'd be enjoying *IBO* if I didn't
know the outside-the-show information that Mari Okada (the show's writer)
both quite likes melodrama and has said that there's going to be suffering
in the show.)