Jo Walton writes of the Suck Fairy, the creature that creeps into old books you used to love and spreads suckitude around in them so that, when you reread them … they suck.
http://www.tor.com/2010/09/28/the-suck-fairy/
I notice it more myself with TV shows of my childhood days (especially when sharing them with my daughter) than with books, but it's been known to happen there, too, more than once. Stuff I ate up like candy, books I thought were fantastic, stories that took me to places I couldn't have imagined and left me with a big smile on my face … have become wooden, or hackneyed, or over-florid, or full of problematic stuff (courtesy of the Suck Fairy's cousins the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, the Message Fairy, the Trope Fairy, the Homophobia Fairy …).
Sometimes fond memories of the past, or significant counterbalancing virtues in the writing can overwhelm the Suck Fairy's best efforts (I'm looking at you, Robert E. Howard); sometimes even nostalgia gets the life sucked out of it by the Suck Fairy (sorry, Lester Dent).
You can't step into the same river again. It's rare that you can step into the same book again. Fortunately, the Suck Fairy can't be everywhere, and sometimes, even from a more mature perspective, the things we once loved escape the Suck Fairy's deadly touch.
(And sometimes, best of all, the Suck Fairy's Arch-Nemesis, the Oh-I-Get-It-Now Fairy visits. But that's another story.)
(h/t +Shannon Turlington)
I have the same problem with music I haven't heard for years.
Especially punk, which I used to
love. The march of time.
+Terry Brown Also known as the "Have You Ever REALLY Listened To Those Lyrics?" Fairy.
Wait, can Superman get drunk?. If so, I want to see a comic in which they tell the story of the first time he gets sloshed.
+David Newman That's from the execrable Superman III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_III), which is saved from being one of the worst things ever only by Superman IV.
Superman getting drunk is nowhere near the most dubious proposition from that particular flick.
Well the suck fairy hasn't gotten to the Timothy Zahn trilogy of Star Wars books. Those are still outstanding.
I hope no one take this the wrong way but when I read "homophobia fairy" I just about busted a gut. LOL