Quick post this week. not a whole lot to say, but this subject has been interesting me. It's one I wrote on years ago, but one that remains relevant: aesthetics.
That's right, we're going to go into that strangely controversial area. I just wanted to write a bit about aesthetics in the modern age to close out summer since it always seems to be more obvious in colder weather. Though the question is more like: where have aesthetics gone altogether? We're not jut talking about bad aesthetics, but any at all!
It matters how things look, it gives people inspiration and motivation when they see pleasant and visually pleasing things to want to do better, and to make things better. Good inspires good and creativity inspires creativity. A dead sense of aesthetics produces nothing but death, which is how things are these days.
This is why it matters how things look, even if we're continually being sold on how it doesn't. Plenty of people excuse to decline and defend the people engaging in it.
For instance, you've probably come across a lot of talk recently about the failure of McDonalds to adapt to the modern market, but let's all be real: McDonalds has looked like garbage for nearly two decades at this point. It hasn't had a single aesthetic improvement in all that time, sure, but it was also terrible to start with the second they decided to stop aiming at families. The first step in the decline was throwing away its purpose and making up a new one that, clearly, doesn't exist.
Of course none of this goes into the cost issues or deteriorating food quality of the establishment, but at this point it's more like the current aesthetic matches the state of its soul. Vapid, empty, and without any identity or direction in a world just the same. They could have renamed it Food Store #3 and no one would bat an eye.
I've spoken before about how ugly a decade the '00s were, and I stand by that, but it did start out at least a little interesting with carryovers from the '90s to keep it afloat. Everyone remembers the see-through tech fad that was aesthetically pleasing among the masses and then never came back again, but few talk about how much better the internet itself looked back then compared to how ugly it is today. That is the clearest example.
But it also changed as the '00s itself got philosophically and spiritually uglier before morphing into the nadir that was the 2010s. If you can think of a single good trend the 2010s brought about in aesthetics that was pleasant and uplifting, I'd love to hear it, but from what I saw the world merely uglified more and more and more until minimalism became nothing for no one, and identity shrank to be makeshift personalities and brand loyalty over anything interesting or new.
The 2020 has not been an improvement in that area, either. We're over halfway into the decade and it's just been more of the same decay. Nothing creative, nothing inspiring.
A lot of the reason for this is that the same philosophy of the first decade of the 21st century is still there. The same crowd with the same vapid, snarky, hyper-ironic slogans from people who hate you, are still in charge. We still say stupid things like "adulting" for instance: a term that tells you maturity and ambition is a switch to flip off. We don't take anything serious and therefore nothing serious can change, and hasn't.
This, ironically, is also the same reason we lack a sense of whimsy. That's right, we're such an unserious people that we can't understand whimsy anymore. Weird how that works, but it's true. If you can't take life seriously, then you also can't take it lightly.
This dichotomy is the trap we currently find ourselves in. We didn't know how to take anything light or heavy. We can't take anything but as a joke at a distance we can detach ourselves from to not get hurt. We can't believe in anything but slogans for philosophy and insults to protect the ingroup. We can't look outwards or inwards, so we look nowhere. We loop indefinitely as everything decays. We're still in 2008.
Our sense of aesthetics, or lake thereof, effects everything and is a large part of why we are the way we are. We don't dream so we don't grow. We threw all that away long ago for safeness and predictability, because that way we won't get hurt.
But that means in the process we've lost things we don't even have a reason for losing! They're just gone and forgotten.
Why don't we have wallpaper anymore? Because our grandparents had it. Why don't we have wood paneling anymore? Because our parents had it. Why is everything sterile like a doctor's office with one note white and black walls and furniture coloring everywhere? Because we're boring. We have nothing to say or believe in, and our homes reflect that reality. That's all there really is to any of it. We can't have anything unique, for fear we might stand out and inspire.
Because we might get laughed at.
Well, why does that matter? Why do we care about the opinions on people who don't even hate us, but wouldn't even blink twice if they saw us dying in a ditch? What is to be gained cowering to that? Not a whole lot.
So let's do it ourselves and stop waiting for other people to do it or come up with solutions for us. Stop using slogans and ingroup signaling to speak at other people. Start having aesthetics again. Believe in something.
And eventually, maybe others will even believe in you.
I'm a bit sidelined physically this week, so I wanted to have something to chew on a bit. That said, it's also more of a trip down memory lane. It's still summer, after all! This is the time for that. It's also the 20th anniversary of YouTube, which ended up changing the entertainment landscape more than anyone thought possible.
When the internet first started taking off among the general public in the 1990s, the monoculture was not only still intact but was also the default assumption for the populace on how the world, universe, and everything, worked and would progress going forward. Message boards and chat rooms were full of what you might call "trolling" and silly behavior, but it was all on the assumption that it was for relaxing between life itself and that it was just a fun side thing. It wasn't yet life itself, and would not become a new home for millions.
That changed slowly through the 2000s as not only were kids born in the '90s growing up (usually completely unsupervised) on the internet, so too did Gen Y end up turning towards cyberspace more and more as an outlet for dealing with the post-9/11 world to find some stability where it once existed. Then of course there was the rise of social media from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter/X, but that was more of a gamechanger for the older generations. Before that happened, Gen Y was carving out its own ecosystem on message boards and comment sections based on cynicism, sneering contempt of once happy nostalgia while also depending on it at the same time. Pop culture also mutated for this crowd as a way to sustain identity in an era where corporate Geek Culture was concocted by corporations to siphon what little money they would have left by 2008.
I bring this up to show the epitome of what this era was like with a site that was called Channel Awesome. Back before websites became little more than content farms and the internet became flooded with bots, YouTube was just one site that was primarily used for a few things, all of which changed radically over time. The key development in its growth from illy home videos and pranks was the attempt to create a new ecosystem to forge an identity by people who largely didn't have any in a world that didn't want them to discover one.
Channel Awesome was (technically still is) a pop culture review site that focuses on nostalgia. They were not the first or second, but the one that first tried making it into an industry. Whether it succeeded or not is for you to judge.
In the '00s, the popular thing to do was to review the childhood's of Gen Y (and younger Gen X and older Millennials: remember, it's all a spectrum) kids to mock and skewer it and show how ridiculous a lot of what the audience grew up with was. Isn't it all just silly and meaningless? But somehow it's important to us, even though it's quite obviously terrible!
There were a few hallmarks of this upcoming genre of video review: snark, sarcasm, irony, and the obsession with "logic" and accepted opinions from Respected Professionals above all. Honestly, looking back at the era now, it's incredible how lock-step a lot of this was. You would not really find much in the way of dissenting opinions, because everyone was expected to think the same thing about everything. Contrarianism existed, because of course it did, but adherence to the monoculture (in this case, the accepted corporate "Geek" monoculture out of a paid Kevin Butler speech) mattered more than anything else. This was your "community" and you needed to belong there, which meant that you needed to be a Real Geek.
The above video does a very good job at highlighting the majority of the members that existed on the site two decades ago, even talking about where they ended up in the time since they started. It's a fascinating look at a time and place long since gone, and how and also why it would all eventually go away. Of course, the video is long, so be aware of that, but that doesn't make it any less interesting as a historical document on internet history that has faded away.
As for why it all went away, the answer is simple: it wasn't enough. The people involved, the audience, and the wider culture, was fracturing as the monoculture was dying in the 2000s, and as it was doing so, new priorities emerged and new identities formed. Those priorities and identities were manyfold, but they all sum up with the fact that those involved realized, at least, subconsciously, that none of this stuff was an identity. That's when it all shifted.
For myself, I bailed on the scene fairly early on when I realized the majority involved where content stewing in bitterness for the old days while also profiting (socially, at least) on those same old days, which made me question exactly what this was all for. No one wanted to create anything, they wanted to live in this weird bubble of pop cult aesthetics and slang divorced from not only the real world but any meaning that childhood might have actually had. The '00s were the hangover for Culture Ground Zero, where it was told products were all you needed to have an identity, the greatest lie Geek Culture told, and by the end of it, especially with the crash of 2008, that wannabe Gen X aloofness cracked and turned into a desperate bitterness over reality.
That's why you had so much anger in those days few remember to mention when waxing nostalgic over the "Old" Internet. The Nu Atheist/Skeptic movement was the first dividing line, deciding an entire segment of their former cohorts were now intellectually inferior and needed to be scrubbed off the internet with sneers that would make a middle-aged Karen politician in Current Year blush. You might think this unearned arrogance and hatred was a defining trait of that particular crowd, but no, it soon became the default way to operate online.
Through the 2010s, as that lack of identity failed, it also split up itself. Atheism +, progressivism, counterculture discourse, but one of the few things that refused to completely sever was that obsession with Pop Cult media. That obsession would even become a battleground in Culture War issues, because neither side could admit that the culture they grew up on not only no longer existed, but they were so focused on mindlessly clinging to their phony identity centered around it that they never considered passing it down to the generation just under them. A whole generation cut itself off from the wider world, because they had long since abandoned it.
Years later and they're still be arguing over the Hollywood system that hates them even as mainstream audiences have lost all investment in the entire affair long before they have. In other words, that pop cult identity is already gone and irrelevant, but they can't let it go. This is because it's all they have, and they need to still have that connection, because there isn't anything else for them left. Everything else is dead or problematic (which is just a euphemism for dead).
The above video that highlights all these many "content creators" (itself a demeaning term) and shows how just about all of them scattered away through all of the above madness that was the 2010s, is a good example as to lack of identity driving everything. Not to say they are fundamentally broken people or anything, but that what united them all together fractured as reality set in. There really wasn't any glue in the first place aside from those old corporate products.
Some of them did right the ship in their own lives, which is commendable, but the loss of shared monoculture is even more obvious when seeing the change in a whole cohort right before you. At the end of the day, all of the above people on whatever side of the conflicts they were on desired one thing: a community to be a part of, and a place where they could belong, and an identity that defined them. That is the real story here.
We've discussed both the book "Bowling Alone" and the madness that the 2010s set forth on an entire generation that had just dealt with the miasma of despair that was the '00s in earlier pieces, but they both stem from the greater issue, which is the lack of any real shared culture beyond products, transactional relationships, and a recitation of a youth that was the last time that connection existed. We are a culture of isolated islands connected by a bridge that fell into the sea long ago, and all we can do is rage about it. However, that does not change that said bridge is gone and not coming back. That world is over.
I don't want to be too hard on the people that do or like any of this stuff. It clearly has value. The wider point is not that it is bad that "geek" stuff exists, but that it's not an identity or a personality. It doesn't make you who you are. What you like to consume does not define who you are, and most of arguments around the subject of gatekeeping in regards to this always just amount to focusing on the phony identity aspect over the much more pertinent quality one, which shows exactly where the priorities truly lie in such discussions. It's still primarily thought of as a desire for a club away from the plebs, not a thriving art or entertainment landscape to grow in.
Art is an ecosystem meant to present a window into what the culture not only finds important, but how they live and what they believe. Without any of that, it's just product in a sea of other product, with no rhyme or reason or direction except to fill shelves. It's just consuming slop to consume slop and possibly harm the outgroup in the process of doing it so one can still feel they belong to an ingroup that doesn't care about you.
But what are they trying to belong to?
In fact, what are we belonging to right now? Are we any better than the young Geek Culture acolytes of the '00s, angling for an identity, or are we still the same lost sailors at sea? Are we still struggling to draw lines in the sand based on cliches, ingroup insults, and more Us vs Them rhetoric? How much more pared down do we need to get from the current state of things? Will it ever be enough? Will we ever be satisfied?
Right now, it's hard to say, but it won't always be that way. Enjoy the trip to the past and remember both the good and bad so we know what to take with us going forward. Because we're going to need it for what's coming up ahead.
Have a good weekend and I'll see you again soon enough.
Given recent heated discussions, I figured it would be best to bring the temperature down a little, and talk about something a bit lighter. We can all use a break every now and then, right? In fact, I wanted to talk a bit about physical media in a way that does not get talked about much anymore. Let's not talk about practicality or physical quality, but something else entirely. I want to show in example of what makes it special. The above video is tangentially related more to show how little I'll be talking about audio quality in today's topic, because I think too many get hung up on it.
For anyone who has followed me for any amount of time, you are aware that I am big into music. Since I started being able to as a kid back in the '90s, I have amassed a pretty good CD collection that, despite bizarre attempts at fearmongering in recent years, is still perfectly functional today. Mostly because I take care of them. Regardless, this is to say I've been at the game for around three decades at this point. While my CD collection is more or less complete (I still have a few more Rhapsody albums to get), I still go out of my way to try to hear stuff I've never heard before.
I tend to focus more on rock music and its many subgenre and spinoffs. It's just what has always clicked with me the most.
Not too long ago, I had an epiphany. I realized that with vinyl records becoming ubiquitous and affordable for the first time since before I'd actually started collecting music, I could finally get into them myself. Obviously I wouldn't be able to ever match my CD collection, but I didn't want to. There was no reason for that. I had always wanted to get my absolute favorite albums in the format, and now was my chance. So, I went for it.
You see, for anyone younger than Gen X, vinyl has been a dead format for the majority of our lives. It was elbowed out in the late 20th century format wars by CDs (cassettes suffered the same fate) as antiquated and limiting. It was not progressive enough and there were too many rough edges in the format. Records were clunkier, held less music, were more fragile, and a bit of a pain to store. CDs, they said, would solve all those problems. They did. CDs are easy to use, hold twice as much music as a vinyl, are much more durable, and very easy to store. There's a good reason mine are still in pristine condition, some bad jewel cases aside. Essentially, CDs were the most obvious step forward, the progressive choice for music listening. Eventually that would move over to streaming, but as far as physical media went, CDs were considered it.
Then it might shock you to hear this as someone who hadn't heard vinyl since I was a child and never owned any myself before relatively recently that I actually think it is the greatest physical format for listening to music and that all its limitations are its strengths. And it's not for the reasons you might think.
The weaknesses of vinyl are actually its strengths. I know that's confusing. You're going to have to put up with my logic as I explain it.
The reason for this is that all the conveniences of CDs are actually a drawback for the listening experience that only multiplied when streaming came along. In essence it was a downhill slide to get here, though I will admit that CDs and the like do have their uses for travel or exercise. That said, for listening to music as an activity? They are not as good as vinyl. Let me explain just why that might be with a few points you might not have considered.
If you've never used vinyl before then you might be surprised as to how much set up there is to getting one to play. Slide the record from its sleeve, keep your fingers away from the surface as you lower it on the turntable, and then start it up. But of course it doesn't quite end there. You have to put on Side A and then lower the arm (making sure the needle isn't covered first), delicately onto the record. Did it right? Congrats, it's time to listen to the first side . . . of two. Vinyl rarely contains more than 20-25 minutes a side, which means you are going to have to stick close to the player and make sure you're there for all of it. Also, of course, to make sure no loud stomping or pushing of heavy furniture happens nearby to disturb the record or potentially cause skipping. This does not afford you the chance to wander off to do anything else. You will be there for the 20 minutes or so of Side A, paying attention. After this, you will do it again with Side B, making sure you're paying attention to the entire album. Here it is time to finally lift the arm and remove the record, once again handling it delicately and avoiding dust and dirt (or possibly cleaning it with your brush) before putting it away again.
Get all that? It's a process.
The end result of all this inconvenience other mediums don't offer? You will be paying attention to the music first and foremost above all else. Nothing else will take precedence, guaranteed. You cannot afford to zone out around a vinyl record, which makes you need to give it all your focus. It's too delicate to be left alone for too long.
All this is why vinyl is the best musical format. The reason is it makes the listener prioritize the music and listening experience over all else, and it's the only format that does this short of attending a live show. When you're putting on a record it is because you want to listen to the record. The lack of skipping tracks, of wandering off, of putting it in the background, means appreciation of the music comes first. It will always have your priority. Yes, vinyl's sound is less flat and more rounded and spacious than digital files are, and that could be an argument itself but the real difference is in how much attention each format must be given.
A sample of my own collection
As an example of my annoying ramble above, let me tell you a little tale. One of the records I have is Hysteria by Def Leppard. You can see my copy right there in the picture. This is a 12 song album that is over an hour long. Naturally, this means modern releases wisely split it across two records, effectively making it a double album. This is an immediate improvement, even despite improved sound quality. The above process of playing all four sides made me give the album my full attention for the first time in ages. No skipping songs, no letting it fall to the background as I find myself doing something else with my free time, and no pausing it for whatever random reason I feel like I had to sit there and listen, really listen, and hear all the bells and whistles and incredible songwriting that album is filled with. As I did so I felt myself pulled into the music and the tone the band sets, and engrossed the entire time making me appreciate everything about the craft, the energy, and the hooks, all the more. It turned what I thought was a 10/10 album into an 11/10 one. It effectively made me think an album I already thought was perfect even better. All of this could only happen because of the limitations vinyl set on me as well as the different presentation of audio than what I'm used to.
It started to make sense why back in the day music was treated as more of an event, why they had record listening parties and why kids would spend time just listening to records at friend's houses: all things no one does anymore. Sure, you can have a listening party on bandcamp, but it's hardly the same thing as being in the same room and having to concentrate on all the contours of the specific sonic presentation smacking you in the face while minding the limitations to keep you focused. Without that there is a high risk of music becoming a background novelty, which is more or less what it's become today since vinyl fell away.
The size of the format itself also contributes to it. Vinyl records are large, attention grabbing, and very in your face. They almost demand to take all your attention when you look in their direction. On top of that, they are the hardest to store and take care of, as well. Basically, it's a form tailor made to be intimidating, which, oddly enough, is something that makes them all the more compelling. The inconvenience is appreciated.
This isn't so much a music hipster thing, I'm not really going on about vinyl being "warmer" as the cliche goes, but in how everything about it prioritizes the importance of its own artform before anything else. That's its biggest strength that no one really brings up.
Even the idea that the storage space is overly miniscule and was improved on with CD and then that was improved on with unlimited streaming is incorrect. Almost all of the best albums worth hearing are under 50 minutes long. In the CD era, because the limit was increased to nearly 80 minutes, albums started to become loaded with filler. This made heavy use of the track skip feature CDs added and took away from the experience described above. It made the album look weaker and feel more disposable. The fact is that the limitation of the vinyl gave albums their perfect length. A 40 minute album is perfectly paced, coinciding, incidentally, with most live shows if you take out banter and general set up. Exceptions like the above Hysteria, an album over that limit, still benefits from the fact that it earns its mammoth length: there's no filler on it at all.
Your space on a record is limited, so you have to dredge up your best material for it and be aware that the audience will be paying close attention to it due to the nature of vinyl. This sets a higher bar for music and is in fact a good reason why Classic Rock has the name it has.
Even in the CD era, albums that did not have vinyl as their primary release format, or sometimes not even one at all (essentially the early 90s through the late '00s, almost two decades), the ones that aged the best are ones that still, for one reason or another, adhered to the old rule set by the format. The best albums didn't "fill up the CD" just because they could have.
This means when these sorts of albums actually get a vinyl release (think albums like The Strokes' Room on Fire, Less Than Jake's Hello Rockview, Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American, or the White Stripes' White Blood Cells), they fit it like a glove. Even the better longer albums transition over to becoming great double albums (think Alice in Chain's Dirt, Soundgarden's Superunknown, Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, or White Stripes' Elephant) like they were always meant to be that in the first place. The pacing set by the limitations of the form not only make it more digestible, but allow more concentration and appreciation for what is being done. This is a good sign that vinyl got it right ages before we figured it out. We were just blinded by new tech and progress, which is a very common 20th century habit we still haven't broken.
Some could make the case that vinyl is only come back because of hipsterism, but that doesn't really explain it's unavailability during the peak hipster years of the '00s and why now it's only coming back in a big way now. If anytime would have been the time for that it would have been the post-High Fidelity snarky Scott Pilgrim era. But that never really took, did it? The reason is because younger generations want the inconveniences they never had, and older audiences are missing it now more than ever. It just doesn't hit as hard with the way things are. Experiencing what you love in a more involved way is always a good way to learn just how you like it.
All of this is a long way to say that convenience has devalued a lot of our artforms. The base level for engaging with art used to require a level of inconvenience which played into engagement, which meant most people put up with it, and they benefited. What we forgot is that sometimes inconveniences aren't bad things. Fishing out a cartridge to stick into your SNES or disc into your PS2. Taking out a tape or disc to slot into your player to watch a movie (and then either rewind or dig through menus). Rushing to catch a TV show on at a specific time or else hope for reruns in the summer. Picking up a paperback or hardcover to flip through and set down with a bookmark. These could be seen as mildly annoying or even frustrating, especially as opposed to how plug and play everything is in Current Year, but they also made these things more engaging and participatory for the audience. And most of these annoyances are just little things, but it's the little things that add up to the total and greater experience.
The easier and more convenient all these things have made things, the more it all gets streamlined into an app on a device to press and go, the less we care and the less we care about creating or preserving these forms, because now they're little more than distraction from mundanity, not art to engage or consider. This is the core of what modern slop is and why it's so hard to define: it's the end result of convenience culture, it doesn't spring out of anything else. Everything has been reduced to a dopamine hit with the least amount of effort or backlash.
To create a future of art that is meaningful, that can connect, and can grow, the old ways have to be understood, and inconvenience must no longer be seen as the greatest evil like it currently is. The warts and the difficulties are part of the experience: they add up to the greater whole. Taking that away simply takes away part of the core experience. It can't really be ignored any longer.
Life isn't convenience, and it never will be. No utopia or perfect world is ever coming. Accept the warts and realize that sometimes they aren't really warts at all. You're just too focused on the tree instead of the forest.
What we need is something real, and that means annoyances. We ain't in Heaven folks, not yet, so get used to it. We're gonna be here a while, so let's make it count.
It's been a bit, but I'm finally back with a new post. This time I wanted to expound on the way modern studios think of their audience. Mostly in that they don't, at all. Well, they do, but not in the way they really should.
You've heard the phrase before: Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You. This means that refusing to reward people who dislike you should be paramount in your decision making. Even if you like something, you shouldn't reward the people making it both so that it doesn't encourage poisonous behavior and so that you aren't complicit in rewarding it. It's been a growing notion, the phrase getting a lot more use these days than it used to, partially because of the buying public's increased apathy towards those trying to sell them products while simultaneously spitting on them.
Truth be told, separating the art from the artist is not not totally possible. The artist will always have something of himself in what he does. However, what matters is not whether you agree with his philosophy or way of life, but if what he creates is genuine art: an attempt to connect with people outside himself. This is increasingly difficult in a world where Hollywood and the music industry (and most other industries) can't help but wag their finger and sneer at those not like themselves, and inform the audience that unless they believe 100% in lockstep with them they are not only not Good People but also unworthy of purchasing their product and engaging in their wares. This unearned arrogance is why such folk should not be rewarded for what they do.
That said, most customers understand this now. The issue comes from after that realization that these people do not see you as people.
In today's art and entertainment climate, finding someone who doesn't hate you is surprisingly difficult, even more so to find one who doesn't see you as little more than a wallet with legs even if you do believe 100% of the same things they do. The only places one can seem to find and reprieve is among scattershot independent artists. It just seems as if everyone has an ulterior motive and, unfortunately, they do.
The above video from Real Life Fake Wizard highlights a recent example of a grift played with audiences that have long since gotten tired of being played with. It is what happens when you don't see the audience as people. This grift is particularly malicious since it requires many layers of lies to be explained. Check the video to see it in detail.
It once used to take a long time to discover these sorts of schemes. It could be decades before you learned that author you enjoyed secretly hated everything about you or that a certain musician was some kind of a criminal deviant as opposed to a normal drug addict. Now, we find out almost instantly because modern artists and creators (and the money men) no longer care about even trying to lie to the people they're trying to get money from. Now they just outright tell them that they hate them, if not with words than with direct action, like this. Whatever level of respect that once used to exist is gone, and the audience knows it.
There was a lot of talk recently about the destruction of "Christian Art" industries and the revelations that there never actually were any to begin with. It was an artificial genre ghetto construct no different than what happened with siffy way back in the 1940s. The people in charge catered to a fringe demographic and pretended it was now the mainstream one, and in the process alienated the majority in order to profit solely from the obsession of Fanatics. In this case, instead of anti-social materialist zealots it is Bookstore Betty, an archetype that barely even seems to exist anymore.
And not only that, they are perfectly willing to throw Bookstore Betty under the bus if it gets them a seat at the big boy table. As seen below:
This is what everyone can sense now about how things are. It's all about grifting now. There is nothing that puts the audience first before opposing sides over silly political games. The worst part is that it always ends up here, in the end.
The issue with most studios/groups/artists/whatever today is that the audience comes secondary to either monetary compensation or fame. Such people are wannabe Hollywood insiders using acceptable verbiage and rubbing the right shoulders to get what they want. They never believed in anything to start with. At some point we bought into the idea that however you make money doesn't matter. All that matters is that you make it. It's either that or become a true believer of some ideology and obtain infamy instead (which will also somehow get you tons of money from your masters for doing what they tell you). This is where the industries have ended up.
But that's never been the reason to create.
You create because something inside you stirs you to put something forth: and it's something only you can put forth. It's not so you can be famous or become showered in praise and money. You create because you have to, because there's no other choice but to create. There's a spark begging to be lit, and when it is lit it cannot be stopped. This is creation only you can make and give to the audience, and it's your responsibility to do just that.
Nothing else will do. There is no other option but to do it.
For one who creates, you can't hate your audience. You can tell yourself you do, or misdirect your frustrations at them (countless examples of that happening), but people who create never actually hate their audience. It's impossible. The reason is because the entire spark to create is due to the need to express this idea, this piece, this work, that no one else can express, in order to connect with other people so you can help make sense of it in some context. At the base of it, this need requires an audience or it's not really creation, it's just vanity. Even if it's unintentional, all art does exist for audience enjoyment. We can't keep pretending otherwise.
Therefore the way many modern companies and creators treat their audience is wrong and backwards. It is also why the audience is shrinking and walking away, and why the monoculture is gone and more or less forgotten now. There is no attempt at connection, only leeching, and there is no industry or medium that can survive for the sole purpose of leeching. This is the reverse of how it should be, and why it is not sustainable.
Lecturing in art is also leeching, by the way. It implies that you deserve an audience to berate and browbeat into submission with your work. All anti-audience motives in creation are also anti-art, a sign of death, and will not lead to any growth. Lecturing isn't connecting. If you want to learn, find a teacher, not an artist.
In fact, that subverted view of the world is why we are where we are right now.
There are plenty of creators aiming to do better than this dead end state of being, and those are the types to support in order to get the art and the work you desire. Eventually the dead wood will be cleared away and all that will remain will be the path forward.
After that? Hopefully we can finally leave this era dead and buried. I don't know about you, but I'm beyond sick of the grifting and the lecturing. I just want something to connect with again, just like it used to be.
The year's almost over, so let's settle in with a good topic today. It can't decide if it wasn't to be snowy or cold where I am, so hopefully it's been steadier for you. Regardless, we've got less than a week until Christmas and less than two until the end of this very strange year. Let's get into it with a topic we've touched on before.
We're going back to the well again with the topic of fanfiction. Particularly we're going to discuss the fanfic mindset and what it has led to doing to creativity. The recent above video by The Second Story on topic blew up, as it usually does with this channel, because it hit on an industry taboo that has been choking the scene for over a quarter of a century at this point. Some of the backlash has been expected, but the larger point needs to be addressed: how did we get to where we are? It didn't fall out of the sky, and one of the sources of fanfic brain comes from the idea that nothing new can really ever be made, which explains a lot about today's climate.
So while we all know the weaknesses of fanfic (and even fanfic writers themselves know it), we still insist on dragging it into everything creative we do as if we need to. Why is that? Why do we insist on fanfic brain over using creative muscles to make something new? Why do we even glorify our inability to fashion originality? It is strange.
And why do we continually reward the lowest common denominator while we also admit it is also the lowest common denominator? This seems obviously destructive, and yet we persist in insisting it is the way it needs to be.
Part of this is due to the IP-heavy way we think about creativity and storytelling. We think about storytelling like children think about toy boxes. "I will have my own Star War", "My MC is just like Goku", "my setting is similar to Asimov but with a twist", and so on. It's "toyboxing": insisting on playing in someone else's world while simultaneously seizing control of it for your own gain. It's using someone else's work as a crutch while also trying to turn it into a strength at the same time. Fanfic brain at this stage has become terminal.
Essentially, we want to make "our own" versions of something else more than we want to make something original or say anything new. In essence, we want to endlessly replicate the feelings we experienced when we were kids experiencing this New Thing for the first time, and while there is nothing wrong with that on a surface level, there is a certain mentality that comes along with it that has very much become harmful. We would rather keep toyboxing than actually create or build anything at all.
As has been said relentlessly, there is no such thing as anything truly original, just reiterations on old ideas. This is true. It is the main reason modern genre checkbox obsession has become so limiting and heavily outdated, because we've been expected to rehash the same corporate IP ideas for over half a century at this point.
However, when one is inspired by something, it is usually because it means they have something they themselves wish to express influenced by that original source. To be honest, this is how we get all the best art and entertainment. This chain of influence is what makes it all so fascinating and all so human at the same time. This is what creation is.
Fanfic is the opposite of this. It is the equivalent of playing toys with your action figures to invent new scenarios alone in your room. The thing is, this is supposed to be done as a child when the imagination is still in development, when you still don't know what it is that speaks to you about these things. At the same time, fanfic is this process but with writing. It is a launching pad for younger people to help understand what it is that truly matters about what they love and either move on from it as they get tired of it, or move into writing original works inspired by what they love and contribute to the culture they grew in. The point is that this stuff is a starting point, not an end point.
"Toyboxing"
But that isn't how it works anymore in our industries.
Now the mainstream is filled with people who see storytelling as little more than toyboxing and writing rooms as little more than fanfic factories to push their own head canon onto an audience that either must except it or go away. They don't really want to create: they want to usurp and become that thing that first inspired them in the first place by wearing its skin and commanding respect. They don't actually want anything new, they don't truly want to express anything, and they aren't at all looking to entertain. They just want their immature selfish desires validated, their fanfiction to be the new canon, and the obvious worship that follows.
It is a poisoning of the relationship between not only art and artist but between audience and artist. It is twisting the good to be purely in the service of selfish consumption. Everybody is an island, after all! Either get on mine, or get out. That's just where we are.
The issue isn't that any of this fanfic process exists at all, after all it pretty much always has and always will. The problem is that this is almost the entirety of not only the mainstream entertainment industry and a large portion of the independent one to. It's the baseline instead of a fringe, like it once was. Which medium is this description referring to specifically? That's the fun part: it's every single one of them. This is everything now.
Musicians wanting to be Led Zeppelin is nothing new, but they used to discover their own original sound along the way to becoming their own band. That doesn't happen anymore. Being inspired by the Simpsons meant something when it was the wittiest show on television, but not when it equates to being another clone with nothing to add to the conversation except cruder jokes and dumber dads with evens stiffer animation. What is the point of such a show, and what does it add to the conversation? Then there is the recent process of taking an old IP you might not have even grown up on and "updating" it for Modern Audiences while gutting it of everything that gave it that character in the first place. Toyboxing at the expense of the audience? That's just cultural vandalism, the obvious endpoint of fanfic brain. None of this aspires to grow anything, leaving the culture stagnant.
It doesn't aspire to be anything except either a thumb in the eye to enemies or a pat on the back from allies. That isn't art. It's junk. And it's the climate we operate in now.
The entire point of creating is to put something of your own out there into the world, to make your mark while simultaneously honoring what came before. The current way it is done of perverting the past while spitting on it and sneering at those you are meant to be communicating with is completely backwards. That is why it does not resonate. That is why the divide between audiences and artists and entertainers only seems to widen.
Until we move on from mocking while stealing from those who came before, the fissure will only widen. Not to say all fanfiction does this, but those with fanfiction brain definitely do lean in this direction in how they worship one part of the whole. It isn't everyone who writes fanfic, but the seed of the mentality is still very dangerous to where it should not be as widely spread as it has been over the past few decades. It cannot be the majority of art and entertainment, because when it is it becomes today's climate.
Nobody wants that, not even those currently in charge of these industries and doing this exact thing right now. It's all just a big mess of half-formed ideas couched with relationship drama that doesn't ever lead anywhere. No one can seem to write a happy ending anymore if they can't ever actually put their toys away for good.
So we must move on from this mentality into better things. It is the only way we can finally leave the mistakes of the past century behind. What else can we do but move on, and try for something a bit more satisfying than that which lead us to where we are?
Let's just hope that next time we remember what it's all for, and it's not ourselves and our own ego. There is more to existence than playing with our toybox while forcing others to watch, and we need to start showing it once more. We need to tell stories again.
And we will. The era of fanfiction is over. What comes next is to be seen. We still have to build it, after all.
I hope you're doing well. It's getting cold fast around here, and boy am I tired of the weather already. It's only December too! We still got a whole season ahead of us.
Not much of a post this week with the holidays swinging around soon, but I wanted to put this one out regardless. Given that books are ostensibly the main subject of the blog, or at least very adjacent to it, I wanted to take them on in today's post. It's also been a fairly consistent topic in a lot of circles recently, so it's probably time to focus at least a little on them.
What makes reading so important? You've almost certainly heard it was at some stage in your life, and it's almost just as certain that whatever reason you were given chased you away from reading instead of towards it. Why is that? We should consider that.
We have a lot of questions to ask before we can get answers.
Why you should read classics? What even is a classic? Do they exist? Why do they matter? All of these are important queries to ponder, though they are rarely asked even by those in charge. These are valuable questions that don't tend to get answered these days, or if they do they tend to be stock unsatisfying ones that have led to the current widespread literacy problems we've been suffering since the end of the 20th century.
I've made plenty of jokes about how when I grew up the Boomers in charge made reading seem very unappealing or lame, epitomized in the infamous "Chicken Lover" episode of South Park with the bookmobile guy. If you're old enough, you remember that stereotype he embodied. That joke character is the exact stereotype that turned reading from a hobby into being a social issue and punchline, and one that made it lacking in all excitement and masculinity. This is the key reason males of my generation and younger drifted away from the medium.
Of course it didn't start there: Golden Age Siffy Fandom hated masculinity, as you can see reading literally any article on the subject from the time, but it was a logical conclusion to make. The "Chicken Lover" character is no different from the pencil neck degenerate who hated Edgar Rice Burroughs and seethed over Ray Bradbury getting attention for writing the wrong stories. In fat, they are basically the same character.
The parting with masculinity and males was a long time coming, and even when the industry had a lifeline with books like Goosebumps or Harry Potter that actually did appeal to males, the publishers went out of their way to shake that potential base as soon as they could. In the process, the audience has fled and to this day has no interest in coming back. As a result, OldPub has labeled itself as anti-male, in that males deliberately keep their distance from it. You can argue with the verbiage or their intentions if you want, but it is clear that they did it to themselves by choice.
That aside, reading has been dying for a good while. Something must be done to stop the hemorrhaging. However, that is only half the problem.
The other side of it is the question of how we bring people back to reading? That is what we must ponder. It's not a simple task and it requires a lot of work to answer. One thing that won't work, however, is finger wagging and making mandatory book lists of the sort that chased the wider masses out in the first place. The primary goal should be to make reading exciting and engaging, and that means finding and highlighting exciting and engaging books that do more than check boxes. In NewPub, there is no shortage of work being published that does this. The issue is more in finding it in the typhoon of books out there. In OldPub, the problem is backwards: there is much uninteresting material being pumped out, and it is extremely easy to find. Getting that straightened out should help the confusion and help the space grow.
The above video on learning what a classic book actually is and what it should entail is a good way to understand how to read in a world where reading is frowned upon. Well, unless we are discussing fanfic (and that will be for a future post), and the like. The fact is that there are a lot of reasons to read, and the classics can give you all of them at once. This is why they are classics and why they should be seen as the goal of the medium, something to aspire to beyond the bare minimum.
Unfortunately, the way they've been taught has not only damaged their reputation, but also the process of reading altogether. And what this hatred of reading has lead to a society that simply can't and doesn't want to read or process entire segments of knowledge that were once common not that long ago. This bad way of teaching is responsible for the destruction currently plaguing not only the entirety of the arts and entertainment sectors, but all of society itself.
As can be seen here:
This wider problem is not improving, and it will not until true value is placed on literacy again. This is because it turns out that reading is important, but not for lame and embarrassing Baby Boomer reasons like "magic" or "imagination" (though you don't hear those hoary tropes anymore, as if they meant nothing to those in charge to begin with), but because it is actually important to form us as people and a society. Literacy is a non-negotiable, as we're quickly rediscovering.
Reading is important to process the world around and above us, the universe inside and outside, the long gone past and the upcoming future, and each other. If we cannot do that anymore, then we are destined to implode inside ourselves. The world we inherited will lose everything we were supposed to carry on and leave us barren. If that happens, then all of this we have gained from our ancestors will have been for nothing. We're already losing important parts of ourselves for no good reason, and at this rate the next generations having nothing to start with will only make it more difficult for them to build on anything or succeed.
Current ways are simply not working.
Of course none of it is hopeless, but the amount of time being wasted clinging to dead industries and mechanisms that no longer (and probably never did) work, is holding up any real change in a direction we need. Instead we linger in talks about endless IPs, meaningless trope checklists, and how to wring more money out of dwindling audiences. None of these address the issue, and we all know it, but for whatever reason the conversation keeps circling around to them over and over.
True change starts from the bottom up. The base is what has to be build upon. Why is this hobby, this art, and this medium, important in the first place? What makes it so valuable, and why do we need to treat it more seriously? Why does all of this matter in the first place? We need to figure that out before we lose even more of our reason to create at all.
We're ready now. It's no longer the '90s and cynicism and overbearing sarcasm is finally dying, as is the irony poisoned sincerity that was big in the '00s. We have a path forward out of this pit at the bottom of this endless cycle we have been trapped in for so long.
It's a bit late this week, but at least today's post is here. November is (thankfully) almost over, and with it this bizarre year.
I thought I would use the moment to state that the problem I was dealing with behind the scenes for the last month seems to be resolved. There is no longer a larger issue threatening me. That said, it will still lead to another related decision on my end, so the nonsense I went through wasn't all for naught. I apologize for the vagueness, but it's because of how convoluted this entire thing has been. I'll try to explain it later. Regardless, I want to thank everyone for their support and their prayers throughout all of this. It truly means a lot to me.
That said, let's get to today's topic! We have other things to talk about here at the Wasteland beyond personal nonsense. That being: aesthetic. We've talked a bit about this topic before, but never using examples from a medium in decline itself.
A lot has been said about the above video on what is missing from films today. You've probably seen it yourself. However, it's pretty undeniable that despite having more tech and more money to throw at movies than we did in the past, they do not look any better than they did half a century ago. In some cases they actually look substantially worse than what came before. There is a certain something missing from them that only ever seems to be captured in independent fare if they're recaptured at all, for the most part. It's a loss of the connection to reality.
That important connection has been lost sight of.
This chestnut has been getting a lot of use recently.
When we talk about "reality" in regards to art, we are speaking of more than whatever loose definition of "realism" we've been increasingly obsessed with since the 2000s. It's not quite the same thing, and I think that gets lost in a lot of these discussions.
This isn't referring to real world locations (or even sets, as one of the examples in the video shows) but in the strange lack of care about reality itself. Cinema is a visual art that requires more than "looking good" to be actually good. It requires immersing the audience into the presented world and the lives of the character, as if we are there with them living out the story alongside our lead. This is because we are. Their reality is just like ours in the way that matters: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings, are all as important to them as they are to us.
Cinema as a medium requires the audience to experience them all tangibly through the screen. It's different from a book that is entirely through the imagination: in a movie the audience is a passive visitor to the world. Therefore the world should be as inviting to the viewer as possible, and all the heavy lifting is on those behind the scenes. It is why cinema has always required the biggest investment to get into.
All of this is to say that art is reality, not fiction. At least, not in a certain sense. The story comes from the imagination regardless of how factual the events might be in the end, and it is the job of the artist to convey it to their audience using all the senses they can. It's a shared experience, a way for us all to experience reality together from a new angle we might not have considered before. That is the magic of art and the wonder that comes from the Unknown. This is not missing (or even rare) today, but it is missing from the mainstream due to the remnants of the monoculture steering itself into an iceberg. If you don't look for it, you won't find it.
To be honest, this tangible relation to the world is the reason the controversial Avatar movies do so well. It is not for the story or the characters, but in the visuals and how the films easily inject the audience into this alien world they would not otherwise not be able to see. These movies make money purely for this, and the people behind them should get credit for knowing how to achieve this feeling even without having real life locations or sets on hand. The people behind them understand the the injection into the world is paramount above all else, and it clearly works.
Granted it comes at a high price (a cost that is probably not to be paid by the majority of other filmmakers), but it is still entirely used in trying to connect the audience to the world. They know what they're doing, and they do it better than any of the big dogs in Hollywood right now.
It also helps in that case that the world in that movie was meant to be a highly detailed alien world different from our own. Were it used to simply recreate Earth, audiences would be puzzled and asking themselves why not just use real location shots? Why is reality being deliberately obfuscated? At that point the tangible connection to reality is lost and the viewer knows its a movie meant to invoke emotions and feelings in them and they will detach subconsciously, or even consciously. The obvious end stage of producing content for mass consumption instead of art meant to invoke and engage. It's just passive consuming, and that's all it'll ever amount to being.
Thankfully there are plenty of others that have not abandoned or forgotten that important rule of engaging the audience. In fact, the ones who do it the best today are typically those with the lowest budgets and means to get their story across.
It's not really any different for cinema as it is for other forms right now, however the higher barrier to entry (the cost) is probably going to see them shrink in number in relation to other forms of art in the near future. That said, when it comes back, and it almost certainly will some day, creators will have learned most everything Hollywood has forgotten.
Much like NewPub taking over from OldPub's failures, there are new generations of creators willing to step up, just like always. When they do they will be a force to be reckoned with. It's just going to be a while before it happens on a wider scale.
Until then, keep digging! You'll never know what gems you'll find out there. And believe you me, there are plenty.
Hope you're all doing well. I haven't had a lot of time to do what I usually do recently due to a (rather serious) real life situation currently going on, so I apologize ahead of time. Things will probably be light around here until the end of the year until it is dealt with. Hopefully I can explain the situation all in the future better than this, but it is what it is right now.
So instead lets talk about other things.
Today I just wanted to highlight this video from David V Stewart as a bit of a companion to his recent one about NewPub's Content Flood and discovery problem. This time the subject is about how OldPub is using the aforementioned conveyor belt production techniques to pump out soulless product while charging a premium for it at the same time. In essence, any problem you might have with NewPub remains far worse in the old system. This isn't newly discovered information, but it is rare that you get such a clear example of it thrown in your face.
This event continues the trend of mass-produced product pumped out into the void for easy profit and to be instantly forgotten. The Content Mill era is still alive and strong.
We're still in the grifting stage of collapse where most people involved in it are merely looking for the quickest way to wring the audience dry before the system totally falls apart under the strain. OldPub, being so much worse off than any of us even realize, has been in this stage so long that the project referenced in the above video would have been shocking as little as a decade ago is now considered par for the course and not surprising at all. In fact now you will even get consumers defending this practice because Rules Were Followed (that no one agreed with). Any excuse for OldPub's behavior is just another sign of accepting decline.
The fact of the matter is that someone wanted a quick buck for less effort and they were willing to excuse obvious fraud to the audience in order to continue the grift. It was either that or they were simply unaware and unwilling to look into any of this because they just don't care. Regardless of what it is, the end result is the same. It is contempt for the audience.
While one could say this is good for NewPub and independent creators, in actuality is probably not good for anyone. Those disgusted who walk away will probably just never come back, and those who accept it will just encourage further decline. At this point, it feels more like the two separate systems have nothing to do with each other and what one does with not affect the other in any appreciable way. Whether you consider that bad or good is up to you, but it definitely seems to be the case that they no longer influence the other at all anymore.
This decay of OldPub has gotten to the point where, if you can slough through similar projects to the above cropping up all over, you are more likely to find something worth your time by avoiding the older industries. This is because, as the video shows, these companies don't really care what gets produced in any capacity. They only care if it's cheap and if they make big bank on whatever is tossed out with minimal effort. Such a mindset will not produce anything great. It can't.
This has been an increasing problem for decades and it's not going to stop anytime soon. There is a reason the older industries are fading. All this is to say it's why NewPub should not be looking to repeat the same errors as the dead industry we are watching break down before us. Pumping out product should not be a goal, not even if the product is "good" because art isn't product in the first place. It can be sold as one, but that is not the core of what it is and treating it like that has not made anything better. This is not a highfalutin way of referring just to "good" art either. No, all art is valuable beyond its monetary value and how much is exchanged to access it.
You can disagree with that assessment, but this old way of thinking about entertainment as disposable and replaceable is the exact reason those ancient industries are dying. They did not decide to randomly produce bad material--they realized their job was to pump out maximum product for maximum return and for minimal cost and effort. When this is the core of what you do, it's only natural that the thing itself was eventually going to be the last thing considered.
And lo and behold, that's exactly where we are. Turning NewPub and all the newer alternative spaces cropping up into this same state will eventually lead to the same result. There is no pause feature on Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. We already know all this.
Entropy doesn't take a day off. If you fight for the same failing processes and systems that lead us here, just in an "indie" coating, you will still end up in the same place you started in. And what good does that do anyone? Why would we want this to happen again?
Why wouldn't we want an alternative industry to actually be an alternative?
Fortunately, it looks as if most creators in the NewPub and adjoining spaces are a lot more ambitious than those in OldPub are now, and more creative in how they use their tools and ideas. But that does not mean we shouldn't keep on our toes that we don't fall into the same traps as the above. It's very easy when one loses sight of what this is all for.
That last thing we want is the same disaster to befall us again.
Anyway, that's all for this week. Thank you for all your support this year. It's been a strange one, and it's still about to get stranger (for me, at least). I'll try to get more interesting topics in the future, but for now that is it for now.
Have yourself a good November and I'll see you soon!
I hope you're all doing well as we stumble into the colder months of the year. Now that we're heading towards the end of this very, very, very, strange year, we can finally talk about a bit more of a generalized subject not relating to said weirdness. Today, we're talking about what we really want in a story: what we really want out of art and entertainment.
Blog favorite YouTube channel, The Second Story, has been on quite the streak for some time now, digging into not just the writing industry, but also the tropes and ideas that have let it spin out into the gutter over time into what it is today. No one agree it's in a good spot now, but we also don't agree on how to fix what's wrong. So it is nice to see a place offering a real analysis that goes beyond catchphrases and cliches into one that bigger issues might be. However, this analysis is not for nothing or even really click-baiting, but in actual real attempting to steer discussion on topics no one was considering before: ones that need discussing.
Today's video subject is no different. In fact, it has more to do with a lot of The Discourse today than we might think at first.
The question of heroism in this video centers on what exactly a hero is. Mainly, it centers on how what a hero is and how it depends on the health of the very populace said stories are made for (as well as who is writing them). Whether the audience wants to read about white hats succeeding and protagonists to look up to, or whether they want to look down at the hero to give themselves a boost in their own life, all depends on the era and the times the stories are written in. In other words, "Anti-heroes" in a sense don't really exist: it's all perspective of the times and those living in them.
Stories are not propaganda, despite what some will say. Stories are a window into the times they are written, showing what the people thought and believed, and how they behaved. What they are is a time capsule of an era and place that cannot be replicated (hence why revival movements never stay still too long) or explained otherwise without context. When you read a book you are looking into a world beyond just the plot and the characters. You are connecting with a whole other space beyond even that. This is what makes writing (and all art, honestly) so fascinating.
There is more to life and art than repeating mottos for the mob of your betters in order to nod together over and be tossed approving glances. We always need to aim for more than that bare minimum. But the times we live don't want their artists to aim high. They want them to fall in line with entropy and slowly fade away.
Writing aims high. The industry? Not so much . . .
Not to say any of this is new. Of course it isn't, there is plenty of bad art and entertainment out there, and there is much that come across as horribly dated simply for being filled with copy-pasted buzzwords, tropes, and acceptable topics of the time period it was writing. What is missing is that such art was looked down upon even at the time. All the more reason not to do it today. It didn't work then, it won't work now.
However, there did used to be alternative scenes and industries. Those have all gone away, but there is still a nostalgia for them. It has given us the illusion of more choice in a sense (as far as the mainstream goes, it was objectively better in selection and variety before), but when one looks into what the gatekeepers were trying to do it back then shows the decay over time into what it is today. We just didn't see it at the time because most of us were young or not plugged in.
It's one of the reasons so much 1980s and 1990s era art has remained so popular, even with younger generations not alive for it: people are desperate to see into a more exciting world, and the one we have now is simply not adventurous, ambitious, or hopeful. The audience want it to be but the industry will not provide that to them. Their inability to live in the present or look to the future means the only place left to dive into is the past. The loss of a monoculture and that a shared wider understanding of reality is still desired, and I'm sorry to say that they cannot get that in modern art regardless of how good it is. You can still get attention saying Lord of the Rings sucks; you won't get any saying King Leper is amazing. They want to feel part of a larger conversation before anything else, including engaging in art. That's just the way it goes.
When this era is looked back on in the future it is almost certainly going to be one of confusion, like a minefield that has expended all its explosives. Why is there so much good art that was barely touched on while crusty corporate swill that expired decades previously got all the cultural discussion will certainly be a big topic. That is due to the lack of cultural cohesion of these times, and it cannot be avoided. However, it will certainly not stay this way forever. It never does.
The 2020s are half over and we still have not quite gotten a defined identity or style to set us apart, and without a monoculture we probably will not, but what we can still do is seek Truth above all and find connections that way. Through the desire for more and higher places we can come together in a more natural way, a way that can allow true flourishing in the arts. This post- Cultural Ground Zero era will probably be defined as a Dark Age of some kind, where treasures will have to be unearthed long after the fact. As it is now, it's merely a mess that cannot be cleaned up.
Then the question becomes in how one can form a defined identity to connect with audiences in this era without having any shared Truth or traits beyond surface level. It is not impossible, nothing is, but how can we even begin looking for the answers? The preview of what this will look like is reflected in the above video's discussion on anti-heroes. So much of what shapes us is dependent on the era and also shared understanding of who we are. That doesn't go away even if there is no wider culture to connect us together. As can be seen by the way we behave even in these times of atomization, we still desire that safety net. We always will.
So without such a thing being enforced from the top down or without those old peer groups that don't really exist or care about each other anymore, where would it then be formed today? Where would it even come from, and is there a way out?
There is, but it's not an easy or satisfying answer. In fact, it's kind of a cliche one to suggest, not that we'll hold that against it. Sometimes the truth is really that obvious.
Standards like this benefit no one.
There is something to be said about not worrying too hard about the outside world when writing or creating. After all, there is not much you can change or effect, so why worry about it? All you can do is what you can do, and not much else.
This is true. What you can do is limited, and you should never forget that. We all have things we want to do, and ambitions above us, however we need to remember we're a part of this, not above or beyond it. We're not Futurians: we don't have to mutate and die.
However, we still live in this world. We are still affected by it, we still react to it, we try to understand it, and we try to see where it's all going. All of that is unavoidable when creating art, even if the piece is deliberately ignoring all those questions in order to reject the discussion. This isn't political, social, or religious: it's just how art itself works. Art is all those things, and none of them, at once. To pick the process apart further is how you get propaganda, and how you lose audiences. All we want is to find a way this all comes together in a way that makes sense relative to the era we live in.
This isn't a call to tell anyone how to create, because that makes no sense. Part of what makes art so great is seeing how others approach certain subjects and ideas with their own angle or thoughts on the subject. Anyone who insists on rules around the creative process itself, or on what can and cannot be addressed in the creation, does not care about art itself.
Despite that, we also aren't in the 20th century anymore. It must be repeated until it finally sinks in. Wholesale rehashing of ideas and tropes from over a quarter of a century ago in an attempt to ignore the way things are now only works if you have something to add to the conversation of the world we live in. This is why old IPs are dying: their time and place has passed and their relevance cannot be replicated, especially when the creators themselves are either gone or uninterested in anything beyond their checkbook. There is nothing there anymore, and no matter who gives their "interpretation" of said properties to make them "relevant" to today, it can't change that reality. Those days are gone, and they cannot be replicated or relived. We have to find new paths.
But you already know that. We all know that. The path now is in choosing what future we will have next. What kind of hero are we going to be? What will we see as the anti-hero in this new era? Exciting times are ahead of us, and we still have yet to finally reach them.
It'll only happen when we finally choose a future worth having. That is going to happen sooner than we might think, but it's not something we should ever stop aiming for regardless of the end result. We're always going to want more. Hopefully this time it's the right kind of more we decide to aim for. We're about due!
