Welcome to the weekend!
It's been a bit of a weird couple of weeks, and I've spent it in a little bit of shock. This is mostly because I did not realize how much the entertainment industry has deteriorated behind the scenes in such a short time. It's actually amazing to look at, and I wanted to share some of what I've seen today. (Hat tip to Pipkin Pippa and her viewers for some of this knowledge. Their ability to discover cringe kino remains undefeated.)
We've talked a little about what slop is and why it's here, but I don't believe we discussed how it's going to be like living through the era of entertainment its going to bring forth. Long story short, it's going to be around longer than you'd prefer. It's going to change everything, while changing absolutely nothing at the same time. To explain how will take a bit.
For a good summation of how things are now check out the above video. It isn't going to stop there, either. Just as we've accepted deteriorating standards in entertainment over the years, we're eventually going to accept the very things we used to laugh at as parodies on old Mad TV and other sketch shows of the 20th century as normal. It's not just a joke anymore. Now it's real.
We wanted it, and now we've got it.
Again, the era of slop did not fall out of the sky. Audiences did not decide overnight they were fine with automated beltline production fashioned around the shallowest of tropes and clichés to be consumed and then disposed of instantly for the next. They were trained to be that way for decades by an industry that wanted walking wallets instead of patrons. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of art at the heart of it.
Do you want to see what entertainment is going to become? Watch the video below. Do not skip around, do not stop early, and do not turn down the volume: give yourself the true experience of the future and watch the entire thing. This is the exact product the industry has been striving to fashion for decades as it normalizes lowering standards in both creativity and production quality. This is the future of slop.
This isn't a joke. There's no punchline here. It isn't a parody channel or an old sketch from when comedy shows were relevant. This is a real channel with over a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube, and this is the level of content they produce. This video is only one example of it.
The channel in question isn't alone, either. There are plenty of others, some of which make similar product based on web novels that span hundreds of chapters. Yes, authors are also responsible for the state of things as they are. We can't just excuse it with the desire to "get paid" when we are contributing to things like the above existing and being normalized. Creating is about more than just making money. There isn't any attempt at connection here, just trope lists checked off (or subverted!) to give the audience the bare minimum to swallow before moving on to the next thing on their playlist. It's deliberately designed to be forgotten.
We don't want to admit it, but this is the future of the entertainment industry. We are pushing towards this every day we accept a Borderlands movie or an Avatar sequel. Accepting the bare minimum is not making anything better, and we know this, but we don't seem to want to do anything about it. We've been trained to excuse a downhill slide as an all or nothing proposition, as if the people in charge own us lock, stock, and barrel.
This is the future we chose.
And to be honest, it might be too late to do anything about it now. The genie is fully out of the bottle. It isn't about AI: it's what lead to AI being used in the first place. No one actually cares as long as it gets them their content faster. That's a truth we have to accept, and one we've allowed become reality. It can't be escaped. It has to be faced.
This is what a growing number of audience members want to consume. This is the direction we want to go in, as an audience. It's just slapped together clichés, vague characters and ideas, and the lowest possible quality threshold. What's worse is that they even have member's content.
I'm not kidding. Here is the only comment on the above video:
This is the future of mainstream entertainment.
We all know this, even if we won't say it out loud. It's a completely avoidable future, but it requires the sort of effort we simply do not wish to engage in. That is what makes it inevitable. The slop future is just ahead.
I wish I had a more positive end result to tell you, but we all know this is the end of this road. It doesn't go in any other direction than this one. All we can do is push for more and support those who wish to do as much. At the end of this road lies normalized slop, and it's getting closer every day. Letting Hollywood take your money is not going to fix it.
In fact, they will make it even worse. They already are.
Unfortunately, that's just the way it is now. Who knows what the future holds from this point forward, but it will only change if we push to change it ourselves. Simply waiting for the old dying industries to wake up is a losing game. We either more forward together, or this continues, and the slide down into the slop only becomes more pronounced.
The future is up to us, so lets build it together. We have to work forward to create something else: a new way forward. I believe we can do it, together.
Have yourself a fruitful Easter and I'll see you again soon!
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