Been a bit, but here's a new post I've been musing on for awhile. Part of it got eaten, but it is what it is. Hopefully the newer version is good enough in getting the point across. Today, let us discuss the actual point of doing something.
Do you ever wonder what it is that stories in the mainstream have been missing? No, I don't just mean "quality" or "good writing" but specific things that were once there but have been either subverted or gutted out of them entirely. We can all tell things aren't quite the same beyond preferences, to the point that even younger generations can tell something is wrong. Old industries we once thought were immortal are dying and no one can explain why.
We can go on about what values we wish were or weren't being taught and how they are or aren't, we can even quibble about how well something is done, but that wouldn't be enough to explain the lack of interest in what was supposed to be an industry meant to entertain no longer doing that. All of the above is fine for discussion, but it doesn't get to the root of the issue. What is it, at the heart of all these problems, is the mainstream missing that it once used to have?
The answer, is a point. Entertainment now only exists to be entertainment and nothing more. It is meant to be disposable from the jump.
The above video talks about recent Hollywood products showing a writing class that is devoid of answering questions they have never pondered, but also are incentivized to not even ask any in the first place. In essence, the creative industry is helmed by people who are not (possibly by choice, though it's irrelevant to the point) creative. That this happened does not speak well not only for the future of the industry but also the fact that these systems allow people like this in charge to begin with. The audience has lost their trust, and getting it back is far beyond Herculean.
We can criticize Hollywood for bad writing or improbable and alien characterizations (and they are very valid criticisms to have), but the heart of it is that the writers really don't have anything to say or get across in their creations. They don't have a philosophy or religious impulse, they just have talking points they either want to expound on that will provide the studio with a bomb, or platitudes and plot beats they will hit in order to maybe provide a safe, toothless hit. There is nothing in between these two approaches, and the majority of audiences can sense it. They either hate their audience or are scared of them, neither of which is good for creativity.
Even the video's example of kids movies are one such problem. Did you know that there were such things as family movies a long time ago? They were not made for children, but the entire family. The target audience of The Last Unicorn, Secret of NIMH, and The Great Mouse Detective, is not the same as the movies being made today. This changed because the movies stopped being made for people but for generic demographics, and over time all that has changed is the invention of more demographics and the bitter resignation that the creator will never hit the biggest possible audience this way. As a result you now get directors and stars blaming the general audience when their demographically myopic and incredibly niche movie fails to be a hit.
It was never going to be one, because it was designed to be throwaway. At some point they forgot the point wasn't for the audience to waste time, but to experience something grand. We are a long way away from that era.
Entertainment became disposable over time, and so too did the attitudes of those who engaged these products. In fact, we now use the word "consuming" when talking about entertainment, as if the only value it has is how fast you can swallow and digest it before "consuming" more product, rinse and repeat. This has also coincided with the rise of the generic term "media" as if "consuming media" is the goal instead of "listening" to "music", "reading" a "book", or "watching" a "movie", all of which are different forms of art requiring different modes of engagement. Now it's all the same slop to be shoved down your gullet.
And there is that word again: slop! That is an apt term for modern entertainment and the creators who shovel it out in an attempt to be part of the undistinguished gruel that slides down the random consumer's throat in Current Year. You can't make slop if the intent of your work is to use your medium properly, instead of just making Content for those 5 minutes of possible attention before the next flash in the pan comes around. But that point was lost long ago.
The reason kids are by and large rejecting the old media complex we still mistakenly, and without reason, think is immortal and permanent, is due to the fact that they know it's utterly meaningless. They might not know why that is, but their brain does, and it's because they see how it exists for little more than consumption of slop. Once you taste something better, something that tries even a little to do what it's supposed to do beyond the lowest common denominator, it is impossible to go back again. There is a reason Zoomers are buying vinyl records, Blu-ray/DVDs, and paperbacks, more and more these days, as streaming is stagnating. Even still, getting beaten by 20 second looping videos of silly cats and goofy memes is not an excuse: YouTube is 20 years old and video games are much older. Why is it only now a problem and with the younger audience? Why have they, specifically, given up? As I said, it's because they know what we don't. It's all worthless.
Just look at what older audiences do to "consume media" slop. We rely on intangible websites and electronic devices to supply constant dopamine. Streaming, for instance, is the ultimate Content mill of slop, even worse than cable TV was, and we're all starting to understand that. The kids, however, already know, even if they can't explain why. If it's all meaningless, then what's the difference in watching silly throwaway videos instead? They have as much meaning as the garbage the crusty old industry for old people does. None, only the videos don't pretend to have any. In many ways, it's actually more honest than what we do.
Though part of that is also because the kids have never had any entertainment made for them, therefore this system in turn means nothing to them. As far as their concerned, this is already a dead industry, and they have no problem abandoning an industry that has abandoned them. In other words, they left long ago and have no interest in changing their minds.
And why should they?
This shouldn't be that surprising, except for people who still think the 20th century is the beginning and end of history. The once-popular space battle franchise did not exist in 1976, and it will not exist in 2076. This should all be obvious. It's how it has always worked.
The solution is not to recycle old things endlessly and hope it remains relevant for younger generations. It is to make new things inspired by those old things in order to speak to the younger generations that currently have nothing to call their own. This is how art is meant to work, and it is something we must get back to once again. How do we speak with generations we're choosing to ignore? Perhaps trying would help.
Stories are meant to speak to people, to communicate to them. They don't do that if they're made purely to check boxes or to be easily consumable and tossed out at the first opportunity. "Making content" is not an approach that will improve the situation or better anything that needs bettering, as can be seen by the last decade of lowered engagement and ambition in the arts. The current approach is not working and it will not magically work again someday if we keep mindlessly doing it over and over again with no change.
To paraphrase a statement in the above video: These kids will not turn 25 and then suddenly decide to watch A New Hope. It has nothing to do with them, they have no reason to engage with it, and it is a relic of another age with no relevance to theirs. They're looking for something more than subversion or nostalgia for things they have never had. They want Creation. They want new ways.
When are we going to give it to them?
There's no better time than now, what with the ancient industries in terminal decline and options for alternatives more plentiful than ever before. As younger generations move on from the remains of the past, its time we do the same. It's time to look forward to the future!
Been a bit since the last post, but there's also been a lot going on behind the scenes. For instance I was suspended from Twitter/X last week for "Inauthenticity" despite my account being a decade old and have been given no actual explanation for it. I severely doubt a human being has even been involved in the process. That said, there's little I can do about it from my end.
Anyway, let's get to today's topic. We're in 2026 and we're nearing the end of a lot of things we thought would be immortal even a decade ago. In fact, we're closer than we've ever been before and there is no turning back.
Movies are over. I bet you've heard that statement before but never really put much thought into it. Why would you? Everyone has been saying it for years. On top of it, it's very difficult to imagine how the death of an entire industry will come about or look like, especially one older than any of us alive today. Well, now you have a very good view of it happening right now and right before your eyes. You are witnessing Hollywood dies as we speak, and it's no embellishment or lie. Everything is coming to an end, and it won't be much longer.
The above video from Red Letter Media features a look at the recent trend of a sea of flops flowing out of Hollywood. Not even movies people aren't seeing but movies people have never even heard of, movies that barely even exist. Content being pumped out into a flood with no destination is everywhere and nowhere at once. These works might as well be AI generated because for all the effort it is making the same impact on the audience as someone who pumps a random joke video out online. No one is seeing anything anymore, and that isn't going to change.
And the question of why that might be is an interesting one. The younger generations are not watching movies or TV anymore. The only thing that makes money is old IP (which means it is primarily Gen X, Y, and Millennials, watching what is put out) and nothing new is being created or built up. There is no younger audience being cultivated which means the industry is destined for the grave. Much like comic books and the music industry before it, the old ways are not attracting new faces anymore. The only people keeping the old crumbling machinery operating are the nostalgic who still consume the old IP hoping for some of that old forgotten magic to return again. Some even tell themselves that it's just as good as it's ever been. This isn't a formula for growth, creativity, or anything new being done, it's just stagnation.
While this is going on in the foreground of the industry for all to see, behind the scenes hides an even bigger disaster.
At this point, it's all just fighting over scraps. Whatever idea that creativity was ever a part of the formula has long since been lost to cynicism and grifting the next couple of bucks out of the nearest mark. This is the only idea anyone in charge has left. There is nothing being built in these formerly big spaces, it's all in decay.
The older generations only want nostalgia and the younger generations want nothing. Nobody wants a future, so one is not coming. In a few generations these industries will be gone, dead, and buried, with the geriatric Gen Y kids who couldn't let that IP die . . . well now they can then be buried with it. So in the end they get what they want.
Though there are plenty of younger people interested in old artforms, none are actually interested in the current state of any of these industries. No one wants to be a movie star or a director, they want to watch Charles Bronson or see David Lynch's filmography. No one wants to go to the theatre, they'll watch an old movie on streaming or (increasingly) DVD and Blu-ray instead. No one wants to rent from Blockbuster, but they want to know how the rental industry worked. In essence, it's more interesting as a myth than as it currently stands, like walking by the ruins of an old civilization and barely remembering it was there not that long ago.
The above example of the video store is actually the subject of a brand new game released on Steam that appears to be gaining traction recently. Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is about running a rental store, specifically, in the early '90s when rental stores were at their peak. There is a good reason for that.
This is because despite appealing to that Gen Y nostalgia, it was also a unique time in modernity not likely to ever be repeated again, and this is really the only way to present it in a way that makes sense to modern sensibilities. There isn't any way to really explain to people who weren't there how these places operated or why they were a big deal.
But now they can have at least an idea.
One might be surprised at how interested younger folks actually are in these old mediums: movies, TV shows, music, video games, and comics. They are just, like everyone else, not interested in the current zombie versions of these things as they exist in in the void of Current Year. One can't blame them for that. They want something made for them, but their generation gets nothing but table scraps and cynical brain rot appealing to keywords and hashtags (the modern version of buzzwords) that exists only to pander and grift a few dollars out of their already slim wallets. No one is aiming for them because they have no idea who they are.
These industries are all fake, and they know it. However, that doesn't mean they don't still hunger for art and entertainment that means something to them. Everyone will always want that. They just know they won't find it in the modern world where everyone is out to get them, not speak to them. It's just a lost cause.
So what actually is the solution? How does one even talk to the younger generations when we don't even speak the same language anymore? Can it be done?
No, probably not.
The only solution is to create a society that values high trust, shared values, and community. It would have to be the opposite of today's hyper individualist (yet, paradoxically, highly conformative) society of backwards language, constant political agitation, and hatred of the past. As long as these divisions exist, there will never be any sort of world like that one that was lost. It will just be more division and less in common until we are little more than several billion little islands floating around detached from each other in the sea of modern society. It's a dead end.
Until then, well, this is what we're left with, and this is all we'll have. Better get used to it, because we'll eventually lose that too. That's just where we are now at this point in time.
I'll leave you with this bizarre (and oddly common) find on YouTube, before that, too, is also eventually swallowed by the void. Travel back to this strange mirror universe of 1991, back when you still had a shared culture and wonder where it all went.
Because it's not coming back again, and the younger generations seem to understand that a lot better than we do.
Thanks for reading! I'll see you all again soon enough.
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.
After last week's controversial and over-sized post, I decided to dial it back a bit with this one. Let's take it a lot slower. Since summer is officially near its end, and a lot of madness has occurred not too long ago, I felt it right to celebrate its end with something more lighthearted.
The subject today is the director Joe Dante, and the video creators in question are Red Letter Media. The videos might be long, but they are very well worth seeing. Take a load off as they cover the filmography of the legendary director of the bizarre and weird who never seemed to get the recognition he deserved despite it all.
Marvel as Rich and Jay from RLM watch through every movie directed by Joe Dante and make more good decisions (Gremlins 2: The New Batch truly is is better than the original) and questionable ones (their take on the ending to The 'Burbs is grossly incorrect and misses the entire point and appeal of the movie) as the two try to come to terms with just who this director is beneath it all. You might be surprised at just where it all leads to, because Joe Dante is a director unlike any other.
Here is the second part of their episode on him:
You might disagree with some of their choices and opinions, but the overall list between them is well chosen. It is a shame his latter work has fallen into the same problems as so many others these days, but it is what it is. His highpoint is still hard to match for anyone else, even today.
There is still no director quite like him at his best.
As for myself, I would rank the top 5 movies of Joe Dante as follows:
Innerspace
The 'Burbs
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins
Matinee
All these movies are very much worth seeing and a window into a world no one else could quite come up with. They've also aged incredibly well with time and are some of my favorites even today. You're definitely never going to find another creator with a style quite like his or manage to top what he was able to do with these films.
And to top it off, here is a shorter video highlighting director Quentin Tarantino's opinion on the works of Joe Dante:
Tarantino, whatever you might think of him, is someone who understands the appeal of the weird and bizarre, or both the high class and B film, and he shows it in the above video. Despite his image, he realizes there is more to art than the surface level. It's something we should all already know, especially as film's peak as a dominant artform is passing as by.
That's all for this week!
Have yourself a good one and I'll see you next time.
It's been quite the week, for many varied reasons, but lets put that to the side for today's post. Instead, lets discuss something else.
Today, I wanted to talk about storytelling, fairy tales, and the importance of wonder. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how it's been both deliberately and accidentally malformed over the course of the 20th century to be what it is today. No one is going to deny that things have changed, but there is also no one who will defend it as in a good place, either.
However, it isn't as if we can just discuss this subject without going into hysterics about either who is at fault or who deserves less of the blame. The truth of the matter is that finger pointing won't do much at this stage. Despite that, we also have to discuss uncomfortable truths and the unintended consequences of off-loading creativity and storytelling to out megacorp overlords. How did we get so far down the hill in a mere century?
It wasn't as straightforward a tumble as you might think.
A good place to start on this subject is this series by YouTuber Cartoon Aesthetics entitled "How Disney Stole Your Childhood" covering the beginning of the Disney Corporation's early days and ambitions up to where it is today and how it has affected how millions of people see the world along the way. It is a revelatory series that fills in a lot of gaps into how culture became pop culture before becoming the disposable trash it is today. Despite the potentially controversial title of the series, this is a story of how a simple co-opting of fairy tales to make a fledgling company's movie productions cheaper ended up replacing an entire cultural institution and warping the way generations of children see storytelling, wonder, and the meaning of their own lives.
Sound heavy? That might be because the stories we tell ourselves has always been more important than you might believe, and the fact that we've spent nearly a century outsourcing creativity to an increasingly culturally detached corporation has done untold damage to the societal fabric. It's also why we can't seem to tell stories anymore.
It's not even to say that was Walt Disney's original goal to end up here. He almost certainly didn't think such a thing as the current Disney Corporation was possible back in the day, but many of his decisions would butterfly effect out to change the entire world of entertainment, destroy reading, feminize storytelling, and also "grow" with the audience into adulthood, eventually leading to the creation of Disney Adults as the punchline they are today.
How did all that happen? That is quite the question. To go into that is a long and convoluted tale, which is why I linked to Cartoon Aesthetics' series throughout this piece. Check out the first video above and you will see the seeds of a lot poison flowers that would spring up in the decades to come. Not that anyone could see them at the time, and perhaps there is no real villain in the story, at least not in the early parts of it, but that is almost beside the point: choices have consequences, seen and unseen, and we are living with the consequences of those choices today.
Why do we have Fairy Tales to begin with? This isn't a question asked much anymore, despite how obvious it once was. Fairy Tales exist to present the world of both the imagination and the concrete intertwined with each other, not only to show children the way the universe is but also to remind adults the full encompassing view of existence we might sometimes forget. In essence, they are the stories of what makes us what we are and point is to what we should become, and what to avoid. They remind us of what being human is.
Fairy stories aren't dumbed down "proper stories", they aren't meant to be infantile, and they aren't supposed to be "time wasters" as is commonly thought to be the purpose of such stories today. No, in many ways Fairy Tales are the basis to all stories, presenting the line where wonder blurs with the mundane to create a full view of reality both seen and unseen. Yes, they might teach lessons, but they also teach reminders, which is why they have a uniting universal aspect to them which makes such creations cultural touchstones and invaluable.
Which is why outsourcing them has turned out to be a disastrous idea that has ended up doing untold damage to the cultural fabric.
The video series covers this, but goes beyond it into much of the insipidness the 20th century did with creativity, including the embarrassing watering down of "Imagination" as some effeminate magical spell that makes you smarter and above the rubes. If you are old enough, you certainly remember how lame it was back in the day. Read a book, and you'll be smart! It just happens! You might remember Gen Y being told just that with the rise of The Kid Who Reads and lame ideas in retrospect like Reading Rainbow leading to the archetype we all know well by now.
Who decided to hand over art and entertainment to the lamest people imaginable and let them rule it with an iron grip? Is it any wonder these people have lead us to where we are today?
This character didn't fall out of the sky
Yes, throughout the 20th century we not only devalued Fairy Tales, but also turned reading itself into a lame hobby purely for anti-social nerds who believed themselves special and above everyone else, two disastrous mistakes that ended up having negative consequences on more than just corporate entertainment but also social dynamics and general maturity. How else can we explain why we not only have Disney Adults but Daily Show snark as the baseline for adult behavior only becoming more and more prominent since the dawn of the 21st century? That didn't come from nowhere.
Not only that, but it became more and more acceptable to be a cruel human being, as long as you were doing it for a "good" cause. Where else this kind of behavior lead if not to total dehumanization and an unearned sense of superiority? Where else does it end anywhere other than today's Current Year misery?
There was a push when I was a kid to never grow up. If you're old enough you certainly remember it. However, the intent was to make you "retain" that childlike wonder inside yourself that was common in youth. Now, while there might be something to that advice, the reason it was even thought of to begin with was because those teaching it to the youth operated in a materialistic dead end world where your monetary gain is what gave you value as a human being and that those who died with the most toys won. Won what? Who knows. The greater point is that the "adult" world was simply not enticing, and the "kid" one was quickly being co-opted by those same forces who knew it. Essentially, none of this came out of nowhere.
This movement created the weird situation we're in now, where even those sneering at Disney Adults talk like 1980s movie bully stereotypes, megachurch pastor parodies (crafted by people who hate them to begin with), or outdated Gen X cool guys (because sarcasm from thirty years ago is still cool, like punk music!). This isn't just a Disney problem, not by a long shot, and it would be good to remember all of this sprung about from a century where those in charge deliberately committed cultural suicide and left their broken offspring to pick up the pieces. The only problem is they don't know how to do this. How could they when this is all they know?
Much of today's emptiness is undoubtedly caused by the lack of cultural cohesion and the rot of the 20th century accelerating everything into the mess it is today.
For instance, as the above video shows, the biggest reason Walt Disney achieved his success was not in aiming at males or even kids, but specifically at mothers, showing them safe, respectable, and cute, stories their children could digest without fuss. Since these mothers were the ones taking the kids to the cinema, they were the ones he aimed his marketing at. And it worked. It worked so well it changed everything.
And it would only work if society were itself structured in a way that allowed someone with this approach that level of control to begin with, not to mention a climate the prioritized safety over adventure. It is no wonder arts and entertainment became so feminized over the 20th century: that's the only direction it could possibly go, and go there it did. It's hard to blame Walt Disney himself for finding this niche, as he did not know where it would end up, but at some point those who followed after him definitely knew, which is how it all became so easily weaponized against its own customer base. Today's culturally irrelevant Disney is a result of this hubris.
Before the fall, however, Disney was unstoppable. Their approach was how the "Disney Version" of everything not only became the default view of those stories, but also morality and wonder itself. Even those destructive groups such as PMRC or ACT were not looking for a definition of wholesome that aligned with Christianity but on Disney Safetyism, itself an ideology a lot of Christians hold to this day without even seeming to realize it. Much of the 1950s stereotypes held up as the ideal (or evil) are not even 1950s ideals: they are the Disney movie version of reality.
Not only that, but the subversive entertainment to become prominent by the end of the 20th century was not reacting to any sort of objective morality or overarching view of goodness: they were reacting to the Disney view as if it were the default. Look how many still portray knights as either savage hypocritical killing machines or ignorant rubes taken up by liars (maybe even both!) which is not an inversion of reality, but a cartoon version they grew up with. You have plenty of swearing and blood in your mature story because the Disney version didn't have it, because your version of mature is effectively just Not Disney. This is not mature, but when Disney is seen as the default, perception is skewed. It is skewed not only for proponents, but also detractors.
In other words, almost all of our modern conception of storytelling, good or bad, is built on a misunderstanding formed by one man's brand that originated from nearly a century ago. This is just one great mess of nonsense, so it's no wonder younger generations find it so confusing to parse how we got to where we are today.
This is the point where one realizes that we are what we consume, and we have not been consuming reality for a long time.
In Part 2 of the series, our host moves from Fairy Tales and how they were (mostly) unintentionally co-opted and into how it affected the younger generations at the time before they were then spread to the younger generations to come. In other words, it is how Disneyfication works and how it's changed since Walt Disney was alive. And make no mistake, it has absolutely changed.
By the 1990s, Disney had grown so fat and profitable that it ended up invading every medium, every space, and every corner of the culture. Any Gen Y kids alive today would surely remember the onslaught of Disney products and noise everywhere they looked back then. It was never actually considered "cool" for guys to be into it, but that didn't mean they weren't exposed to the Disney brand at every opportunity.
This paired with both the subversion obsession of the era (again, based on Disney's wholesomeness, not the real deal), the pussification of reading as seen for girls, geeks, and weirdos, and the ubiquitous presence of the Disney brand itself, you ended out the century with a generation raised on corporate product while detached from the cultural roots it came from, yet also fed a constant diet of anti-social messaging (simultaneously paired with multi-cultural We Are The World weirdness) finally creating a generation that would be a made into a good global citizen. This concentrated unreality pushed as the New Normal would fix everything.
By the time the 2000s rolled around and the 20th century passed, everything that made Disney what it was in the first place had been destroyed, paved over, and co-opted by either Disney themselves or subversives twisting itself on the Disney view. In essence, reality had been completely supplanted by this new unreality.
Even when 9/11 came around to shatter this Disney reality as unrealistic and impossible, we clung to it all the tighter. When the media told us the Bad Guys were doing Bad Things, we snarked at them and obediently believed we could fix it all by Being Good in the acceptable way. What were these definitions of good and bad built on? They were Disney forgeries, not necessarily created by Walt Disney, but formed by a co-opting of his simplistic formula and corniness to create a weird subset of Adults who weren't Adults, but Kids who proudly Never Grew Up. Unreality.
All of this destruction originated from the same place, the same attitude.
The phenomenon of Disney Adults today is frequently focused on in the most blatant and obvious manner. We think of the ones who go to to Disney theme parks and whine about everything while acting like brats or the ones who go online to stalk or obsessively tear down anyone who dares think different from the modern Disney Media Conglomerate. However, the mentality does not stop with those obsessed with Disney (or even Disney adjacent properties like Star Wars or Marvel which are no different) but also consumes the forgery of reality known as Geek Culture.
Geek Culture itself is a mutation, born out of the 2000s where the media companies attempted to sell a Geek image to build itself a sort of Disney-like acolyte out of. All Geeks love all Geeky Products! What are Geeky Products? Why, things you were made fun of by those icky normal types who are now trying to co-opt your hobbies to control for themselves out of the blue for some reason. Forget that all of the product and brands were originally sold to kids by the millions for a quarter of a century before: you're special and unique for liking an IP and defending it against the normals (or let's just stop beating around the bush: "normies") who are invading your hobbies because . . . well, they just decided to one day. How dare they? This space was made for you so you could be cordoned off from the world and live in your own reality away from them.
You are superior and above the normie, after all: it's in their name! They're "normal" and normal is inferior. You are not normal; you're better.
Forget that normal people have no ideological compulsion to invade spaces and change them, and forget that these spaces have always been swarming with normal people (you just either never noticed them or paid attention), but it also gives cover to actual subversives to come in because all they need to do is learn the secret codewords and jargon and they can to anything they want when they get in the door. This is also what did eventually happen to Disney before it happened to anything else. These aren't normal people: they're self-centered obsessives who want control, because they are special and above everyone else.
This happened because at a certain point we became aware at how effective mass media was at altering the way people think and behave. The existence of Disney Adults even being a category at all shows just that. By the time of the "Disney Renaissance" in the late 1980s, the people in the company knew what they had and became more aggressive at pushing out what they wanted using the Disney formula but wrapped in the growing irony and cynicism of the time period. It eventually did bottom out, but by that time Disney had seized so much cultural capital (and other studios like Pixar) that they were able to weather the storm and survive like a cockroach in nuclear fallout.
That is why those who think Disney was "taken over" by weirdos or subversives are kind of missing the point. They have a vision now, one obtained through unreality, and they will work to make it real. They are so blinded by this falsehood at this point that in their quest to finally acquire the male demographic with Star Wars and Marvel they absolutely feminized and gutted them without even the least bit of subtlety, and are now scrambling for a way to get males without them somehow. As if they have already forgotten what they did wrong to begin with. No one could behave this way without having been soaked in Unreality for too long.
In other words, they are now lost and spinning out. Disney's peak has passed and as their own works have finally begun to hit the public domain (ironic, isn't it?) and they are quickly learning that very truth. That era is over, and we now are seeing the mistakes for what they were.
This is what the third and final part of Cartoon Aesthetics' series shows. We can now see the end result of the Disney Corporation's conquest of the modern world and the conquest of Fairy Tales. We see the end result of where it ended up: a soulless and empty husk of safe morality and shiny words which ultimately mean nothing and added up to nothing of value, at the end of the day. We see what a post-Disney world is all about.
Not to say that Disney itself never had value or produced anything of worth, but where its philosophy and direction eventually lead to could never go anywhere else. They weren't even necessarily the source of all of this, but more of a spirit of the times finally reaching its end point. The spirit of the 20th century is what it is, and it's long past expired.
The end result of the all of this is in the atomized dead end world we now inhabit. There is no more Pop Culture, there is no more shared monoculture, and there are no more shared values. Just as third places, local community, and the concept of identity itself has been subverted and hollowed out by modernity, so too is the remainder of old empires like the Disney corporation a vapid husk of what it once was. Old IPs made by much more talented and inspired people being worn as a skinsuit by modern Disney Adults who have no higher aspiration than to be a Good Person dictated by whatever the Good Guys in charge of them tell them is Good. Thus their own works must be constantly subverted and "updated" with modern morality and acceptable verbiage. It never ends.
Go get drunk with your friends in Disney World as you celebrate your 35th birthday. That is clearly what Walt himself intended, right? What higher aspiration can you even imagine with a mentality like that.
Nothing truly eternal can be built on or even built in the first place. All that remains is a race to the bottom of lowering standards, tired tropes and aesthetics, and emptiness disguised with bright colors and loud noises. This is the post-Disney world.
We have since lost sight of the original Fairy Tales and their aim to show us the world as it is in multiple forms. Storytelling itself is meant to present wonder, excitement, fascination, and awe--not to lock it down to trope lists, acceptable corporate language, and a weapon against your very neighbors. We have completely inverted them and in the process, lost ourselves.
Until we work to reclaim it, nothing will improve. As the above series subtly states and ends with, unreality only leads to more unreality. People cannot live in proximity with those who do not share their reality: we have all of history to show what that eventually grows into becoming. One vision will have to prevail in the end: and the one less than a century old that itself has been rotted out from the inside is not going to do much other than lead people to pills, head doctors, and the bottle. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what has happened to us.
The only solution is to go back, to remember where those Fairy Tales came from in the first place, and to build off them once again. Dead end roads and failed experiments must eventually be seen for what they are and be abandoned. Truth is more important than lies, and the best stories cannot lie: they can only tell the truth.
Truth is older than trends, it means more than sentimentality, and it runs deeper than cute images and saccharine catchphrases. It has to be rediscovered and reclaimed before everything falls apart worse than it already has. Thankfully, it is not too late yet.
There is more to everything than what we see. It is about time our stories finally reflected that again, otherwise unreality is all we will ever know. We cannot live without truth, we can only exist, and that will never be enough, not when we were made for more than this.
This is what Fairy Tales are for, after all. Until our stories change, we will not, and they cannot change until our perspective does. Here's hoping we manage before it is too late.
The end of August is finally here, and we're heading into the last third of the year! One last stretch to go and we'll have made it. Until then, let's have a little fun as we usually do on the weekends. Today will be a more straightforward one.
Considering recent topics, I wanted to go over one we've touched on a bit, but one that seems to be coming back with younger generations: the rental experience. What exactly do we miss about rental stores, and what can we get back?
For one, obviously the preference for a long time has been to own. When DVD first came in during the late '90s and became standard in the early '00s (almost two decades ago) it became a lot more common to buy what you wanted. Rental stores themselves (the chains, particularly, though some smaller ones did this too) cleared out old stock cheap, some even offering classic games that go for hundreds on the second hand market for peanuts. It made sense why that was popular, sometimes favorites disappeared and you would never find them again. You had to grab what you could.
That era passed quickly, however. and the '00s changed as they went. By the end, social media was standard, cheap DVDs were common, and this new thing called streaming and even YouTube had taken over by the late '00s. Blockbuster died, becoming a corporate monolith pumping Hollywood product at the expense of local scenes and lack of variety, showing that the customer could have more than the hobbled selection they were left with by the end of that behemoth.
I know there are younger people (particularly '00s kids, Millennials) that don't believe me, but Blockbuster was a corporatized monopoly that replaced local industry, no different than pretty much everything we complain about today. It choked out variety, (local stores had their own selections not mandated and supplied by Hollywood directly), local filmmakers who used to have incentive to share their wares at their local store, and turned the rental experience into a bland facsimile of what it once was. Everything you complain about today in regards to places like McDonalds, Walmart, and even the recent Cracker Barrell disaster, all started with Blockbuster. Make no mistake, if it was alive today, it would be just like them.
That said, Blockbuster was not without merit, even if a part of the decline of the industry itself. There is something missing in the entertainment space without renting around. In fact, there is something missing in the entertainment space in general, as we have finally accepted it all as throwaway and interchangeable, and as we've done so we've begun to crave that missing piece we've been missing. But what exactly was it?
As the above video shows, it's all the little things, the touches of humanity that have since been lost to interpersonal Consuming and hiding away from the world.
Just think of how much the medium of cinema has changed, for the worse since the 20th century. One can also throw television in here too, and even aspects of gaming (like multiplayer). It started as a public activity in a high trust society, and ended as a private affair in a low trust one. It doesn't matter whether you "hate people" or think your taste impeccable and beyond reproach, but an activity that once included sociality as an important factor which is now completely stripped away signals something important has indeed been entirely lost.
Some might say we cannot get that back, that "progress" is inevitable and time marches on so we must adapt. While the latter is true, the former does not understand that every single change that happens in life is not automatically "progress" and needs to be kept around. We now know that something behind "new" does not preclude its quality, a lesson we had to learn after that decade of disaster known as the 2000s and the rot to come of the 2010s.
There are things we lost, important things, and we need to bring them back. We cannot keep pretending we can go on as we currently are.
Streaming has its uses: online gatherings, meetings, and even video sites, have their place. What it cannot do is replace real life needs, like social interaction. For example, online multiplayer has never come close to replicating the feeling of playing in the same room with someone you can directly interact with. Even when the games were better, they never matched up due to missing that important feature earlier classics took for granted. The cinematic experience is the same.
It goes without saying that the solution isn't to bring Blockbuster back, or to get another company to replace what it did. The corporate era is over now, and it's clear we cannot bring it back. Much like how McDonalds hanging its awful modern design wouldn't change how choked out the fast food industry has been of fresh blood in decades, just putting up logos and chanting old sales pitches and advertising lingo won't repair the larger problem.
It has to start locally. It just does. There is no other option. If one really wants the rental experience to return, it is going to have to start there. It is going to have to start where it began, in small mom and pop shops serving the local community. People are going to have to drive out of their way, even from the next town over, to scope out your wares and spread the word. Just as it once was, this is the only way it can be.
That being said, it isn't like just offering rentals will change the social climate. Telling someone to just start a business to fix social problems is a recipe for disaster. But we have to start somewhere with an idea, and that is closer to the ballpark than wishing for the return of corporate control of an industry again. That is just plain never going to happen and not a path worth traveling down. We do not need another Netflix. We do not even need the current one, to be brutally honest.
So I'm not going to make this post anti-Blockbuster or anything of the like, because it really doesn't matter at this point. However, there is something to be gained from such a simple industry being lost purely for automated digital distribution.
The arts and entertainment in general have been losing their connection with society, with real people, and it isn't a new phenomenon. We've trumpeted anti-social "leaders" and artists for decades as the people whose example is worth following, and it's led us to where we are now. We can't go any farther in this direction as it it has done little but foster acceptable mental illness in the mainstream and confuse the abnormal with the normal. All standards have been lost.
To go forward at this point requires going back. It isn't a suggestion, it is simply reality. We've spent too far mindlessly plowing ahead and ignoring the road signs while plugging our ears and repeating "progress" like it's a religious mantra of some kind. Continuing to do that, despite its very clear failure will not just magically work now, because it never did to begin with.
This goes beyond just renting, but I think that much is apparent to anyone reading this, so I'll just stop right here. What is more important is that we're aware of past mistakes so that we don't make them again just in more ridiculous ways.
That's all for today, I hope you've had a good August and I will see you in September! Let's charge into fall in style.
Thanks again for all your support. 2025 has been a weird one, but there are still many of cool surprises ahead of us. I can't wait until I can show you what I've been working on.
We've gone over slop enough recently, so lets talk a bit about what happens when you rely on it for so long that it destroys the very industry you operate in. The above video from Red Letter Media decides to wade into the obvious reality that Hollywood is dying. Their conclusions might be different than some, but it is still very obvious as to what is happening.
The "success" of the Minecraft movie is a very telling one, and also depressing to think about for those who enjoy the artform. It is essentially a Snakes on a Plane, but successful. In other words, it's a movie that has made money due to the death of the medium.
for those who don't remember, Snakes on a Plane was a bad movie that had no marketing budget except to try to reel in folks with how bad it was. The entire marketing campaign was a meme before memes. You didn't want to see the movie to enjoy a quality product or have a good time at the cinema. They wanted you to watch something bad and give them the privilege of handing them money for it. It was an "intentionally bad" movie before that trend got kicked off. In essence, it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
However, it bombed. The mainstream audience still wanted good movies. They still wanted quality and effort put behind it. It was a sign the industry still had life in it because the audience still had expectations for the industry. They no longer do.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Minecraft Movie is only popular because it's a meme that people want to laugh at. They're going to the theater to trash it, to run roughshod over the place, and to cackle ironically at the product made to entertain them. I am not even discussing the quality of the movie itself: as RLM above shows, this is who is seeing the movie and this is the reason they are going to the theater. This is a sign of a dead medium.
As we've also discussed before, there is a lot of issues internally, as well. Sound design is a mess. The masters are retiring and dying off without sharing their secrets. CG is decaying despite requiring more people than ever before (to also work even longer hours). The overreliance on ancient IP is wearing out its welcome, even though nothing new is being made that can seem to connect with audiences. All of this is a sign of an industry that has lost the plot and has no idea how to move forward. That's without going into how those inside the industry appear to have no connection of understanding of their audience at all anymore.
It's all just a giant cluster of confusion.
On top of it, as they also report, the other movies on the highest grossing films of 2025 (so far) list, are all bombs. None made their budget back, and considering how much they spent to be made, breaking even wouldn't even be enough. All of this is the clearest pattern of a dead industry on the way out. It could have been avoided, but we are past that point now.
No one is going to the theaters for "Hollywood Magic" anymore. They are either going to laugh at it, or not at all. They are attending IP farm entries less and less, and walking away at increasing rates. Not even the overseas market is interested like they once were. It is a sign of the times and another market that the 20th century is over. We aren't going back to where we once were ever again. All we have is what lies ahead. And we have no idea what that is.
And for those who keep pointing excitedly to their own TVs in the comfort of their own homes: There's still no money in streaming. No one has yet to figure out what a hit is or how to even measure it. They will continue to strike over this issue, but the bigger problem is that there isn't any feedback on the level of the box office or Nielsen ratings for streaming. Especially not in the online space where bots and paid agents clutter social media space. These are glorified ads more likely to annoy potential audiences than anything else.
All of this is also without going into the loss of shared culture. There is no reason to watch something you aren't sure if you're going to like if there's no one to talk about it with. What's the point? Water cooler talk has changed.
In fact, everything has changed. That is how the passage of time works. While the world we grew in is long gone, so is the world of even a decade ago. Old systems are falling away and will eventually leave the field clear for new ways going forward.
We're going to have to explore it ourselves, it seems. That's fine. There are plenty of excited creatives in indie spaces willing to do what they can to entertain you instead. until we figure out how to rebuild again, this is our best bet going forward.
Personally, I have the Psycho Mission serial currently ongoing at the blog (with a just-released podcast episode about it here!) as well as other projects on the way. But I'm also just one of many working as much as we can in a landscape with no real direction forward. There are plenty of others, including one below I'd like to end today's post on.
I would once again like to thank you for reading. It's been a long ride so far with no clear destination ahead. I appreciate you joining me as we figure out our path through the wasteland. Hopefully one day we'll find the way out.
We've gone over before the idea that certain segments of the arts and entertainment don't look as good as they used to, but we've never taken a deeper look into how specifically things might have changed since. Why can't we seen to remember how to make things look their best? The above video on the decay of film might help with that.
While watching The French Connection for Cannon Cruisers (Yes, there's a spoiler of an upcoming episode for you), one of the questions that came up was why exactly films just plain don't look this good anymore. William Friedkin and his crew didn't have even a fraction of the technology available to us today and yet the movie looks, sounds, and feels, far more different than if a similar movie was made today. In fact, its quality is light years beyond what we can do with current digital technology. But why exactly is that?
Of course the easy answer is "we're losing the talent and means to make good art" but then the elephant in the room, the one that is never answered, becomes how it is being lost this fast? In our technology obsessed culture, why are we glorifying inferior technology that doesn't make art better? From cell animation to arcade design to the short story, we are losing valuable parts and origins of the arts we were raised on, and we do not seen to care even as we complain about how the modern material is not only not holding up but is also beginning to turn younger generations away from art altogether. This is a serious issue that is just plain being ignored.
I don't really have the answers for dealing with the decline except to first acknowledge it is happening in the first place and then to encourage those in said industries to preserve said techniques before they are pointlessly lost forever. Art is meant to build on the past, not to reject it for the ideologically hollow and terminally sneering mess of an industry we have today.
At the very least, unlike, say, a decade ago, everyone is very keenly aware of these problems now. I've met plenty of zoomers who love these old methods of creation and even attempt to revive it themselves. It's admirable, but they can't do it alone. The change rests in all of us working together to strive for a better field, and the younger generation can't do that alone. Gen Ys, in particular, finally need to put our selfish pride away and go in for more than nostalgia bait IPs that should have been left to rest ages ago, and expend more effort building something new.
Again, it's not about abandoning the past, but building on it. Those old IPs were built and things that came before. We need to do the same now in order to finally move forward. We cannot continue to peddle dead IPs whose time has already come and gone. We need new blood and we can't get any if we keep deliberately elbowing the new generation out so they have no space at the table. Otherwise we are headed for a dead end, just like the mainstream industry.
You can't put new wine in old wineskins, and yet that is what we insist on doing with nostalgia culture. We need fresh takes and new angles on classical archetypes and frameworks. We can't can't do that if we refuse to move on from dead IPs.
The 20th century is over, remember, so too, must we put behind the childish ways from then that led us in the gutter today.
What kind of industry is this supposed to build, exactly?
We also refuse to move on from considering the audience, our fellow man, as anything less than walking wallets to be pried into at our convenience. As if they are little more than plebeians to be lectured to, that they must Shut Up And Listen, to anything we have to say.
No, I won't go into another tirade on Fanatics, I've done that enough, but to emphasize this isn't a problem with one industry. It's all of them. The aging theater kid mentality that was chased out normal people, reviles male audiences, and obsesses over "updating" old IP for modern sensibilities at the expense of creating anything new, has reached its end. Everyone sees this now. It's unavoidable, and it is being recognized, but there is still no plan in action to correct it.
I realize I've made a lot of enemies over the years for being blunt about the way things are. The thing some of these people get is that I never went in with the intention of wanting to blow anything up. I went in with a mentality of wanting to understand the growing disdain for normal people, the anti-social celebration of destruction that is modern art, and the obsession with Kool Kid Revenge of the Nerds mentality. Essentially what I learned is what we all already know. Nothing can be created through destruction, blind hatred, and arrogance, never mind all together in a wrecking ball mislabeled as "art" that has unable to make anything sustainable.
The first step to doing all of this is to stop with childish clique-ism and shrinking the field to feed our egos. It's to find ways to build new ideas based on classical ideas in a culture trained to hate it all. We should be working together, not managing decline.
Until we do that, we're destined to keep bashing our heads against the same brick wall for at least another decade as our industries swirls further down the drain. If we don't finally act, we risk losing much important. At that point, we might not have any solid foundation left to build on, and then what can we build?
Welcome to the weekend! It's the last go around for 2024!
For the last Weekend Lounge post of the year I wanted to introduce you to the Cannon Cruisers YouTube channel. This one isn't actually run by me, but my co-host, and, as a result has a more modern look than the rest of our channels. It's not up to date, but the channel will be slowly updated as we have the time.
It's another alternative to check out the Cannon Cruisers, if that's the kind of thing you're interested in. We talk old b-movies, discover old classics (and not-so classics), and have a lot of fun along the way. We've been doing it for over half a decade at this point, surprising both of us. What started as a lark turned into a long term side project for both of us. I don't think we'll be stopping anytime soon. There's plenty to go over.
We've covered over 300 movies since we started, by the way. You can peruse what we covered on our Letterboxd page here.
Uploads on the YouTube channel are not our first priority right now, so if you want to keep up I highly recommend going straight to the blog itself. It was the first place we set up camp and I make sure to update it every week or when there's a new episode up.
As always, check out the Cannon Cruisers if you like or are interested in old movies and want some fun.
Completely unrelated to that, I was recently fooling around with AI music again, and concocted the following EP. It is related to a writing project I've been slowly trying to puzzle out of my end of the year brain.
The idea was to create an EP that matched the weird dour tone at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s before 9/11 or even Columbine really changed the mood permanently. I specifically chose third wave ska to do this with because of how much the genre changed over the decade and I wanted to see if I could push it in a different direction than it went in reaction to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting Clear Channel monopoly which more or less banned it and other genres of the time from the radio. So it's an oddly reflective piece on endings since there was a lot of that as we were leaving the 1900s behind at the time.
In other words, I wanted to grab a mood that existed with a sound that didn't. Where could it have gone if things went differently? Who knows. I tried to puzzle it out here. It was an interesting little project to try out because I could almost imagine it existing, even though it didn't. and in retrospect it's kind of eerie, which I suppose was the point.
The album starts with the skate-punk inspired sound the decade started with before changing over the course of the album to being more in line with the more confident style it had by the end of the 90s when it broke into the mainstream. Where could it have gone after this, we'll never know. It was cast out of the club and most of the bands either abandoned the style or deliberately went insular, crashing the genre in the '00s.
This is a bit of a what-if, I guess.
As for how it relates into my writing, well, you probably won't see that for awhile, but a lot of it is based on a story cycle I've had in my head for awhile and have been trying to write down for about as long. So if you see lyrical motifs or lines show up in stories later on, you'll know where they first showed up. It's been strange cobbling this together. I've never quite done anything like this before, so it's been strange figuring it out.
But, really, just have fun with it. Enjoy the music, download it, remix it, or ignore it. Love it, hate it, or be indifferent. Whatever you want. It's a bit of an experiment to help me with inspiration for something else, so it's all meant in good fun. Don't take it too seriously!
Enjoy the Northbound Lights, a band that might or might not have existed from an era long gone that increasingly few remember. There's always something we can learn from those forgotten days. In this case, I don't know. I just felt like doing something strange and off the wall. You can find the End of the Century EP for free here. It might be a bit different than you're expecting, especially if you only know the genre from its oft-mocked tropes.
And that's all for this week!
Enjoy the last week of the year and I will see you soon enough!
Welcome to the weekend, and December! The year is close to done, but we're not.
For this week I wanted to go back a little to the previous subject. That subject being heroes. There is quite a bit more to say on the subject.
One of the major topics has been the failure of enshrining subversion as a storytelling idol. The mainstream has been trying, in increasing efforts, since the 1990s, to cast doubt on and talk down on heroism and the Good as storytelling essentials.
They've used every trick in the book to warp taste and reshape the audience, from the anti-Tolkien flatline that was People Are Bad And Nothing Matters to the superhero turds of Heroes Aren't Real And We'll Prove It Through Our Strawmen, to even failed satires of books like Alien Bugs Are Good, People Are Always Bad, where the audience satirizes the satire to reaffirm the original book's message and the big brain subverters think not being able to understand that reaction makes them smarter than everyone else. It's pretty much a mess, and it all stems from having a class of creators that hate Creation. And as a result, the audience has left them behind.
Because despite it all, the truth slowly seems to be coming clear. Despite how hard they've tried over the past quarter century+ to do it, heroes cannot seem to be truly subverted. Even the modern "smart" attempts always end up failing in the end.
For a more concrete example of what I'm talking about, I highly recommend watching the above video that shows exactly that. Despite an iron grip on the audience's attention, the tired attempts at talking over them and flipping over what they love has ended in a disaster. No matter what they do they can never escape the truth: heroism is real and it will never go away, be poisoned, or made "grey" with "complexities" by people who have yet to truly do anything interesting or new with their so-called creativity. All they do is make muddier versions of things people already like, and that's quickly losing audience members in the modern day.
What does this mean, in the end? You already know the answer, it's been clear as day the entire time. Despite our endless insistence on jangles keys and Being Surprised, at the end of the day we still want the same thing to happen. Everyone always wants Good to win, and Evil to lose. That hasn't changed, and it won't change, no matter how much one wants to blur the line to make themselves seem greater than they know they truly are.
Nothing really changes, even when it does.
That's all for this weekend and I will see you next time! We've only got one months left to close out 2024, so let's make it count!
