• Bloobish [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's so fucking weird how this has created a self feeding oroborus of media that continually reinforces the notion that "omg your teenage years are supposed to be the best ever!" like some faded after image of what was really going on with all the latchkey kids of the 1980s. Like all the pop culture nowadays has a chance of being made by a maladjusted man-child that was fed this weird aggrandizing teenage fantasy bullshit and are now in perpetual midlife crisis mode. Hell I almost fell down this fucking trap as a college student thinking "oh I'm not doing X which means I'm failing at life". Shit is fucking insidious and meant to instill a perpetual desire of consumption.

    • RATMachinespirit [he/him,they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      FR, to build off that, my mom was one of those latchkey kids. She hated it and was lonely. It is not something to idealize. (as a social "reject"), letting social rejects control pop culture is a mistake with dire consequences for the popular zeitgeist. Thank god I discovered leftism, it does wonders to dispel this bullshit. Insidious is a good descriptor, but is still to mild. English lacks a word for how fucked this shit is.

      • Bloobish [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Honestly it's helped me a lot deal with self persecution issues due to idealized pop cultural milestones that aren't actually fucking real (see one of my other comments in the thread on sex pest nerdy men). I'd likely label it as some type of terminal cultural parasite that distorts how you perceive reality. It's why so much of culture nowadays feeds in on itself and can't see past itself (see all the comedy shows created or inspired by all the Newgrounds folks and how fucked they are).

        • RATMachinespirit [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          do you mind elaborating on the newgrounds thing? I am vaguely aware (flash games during the computer room study hall as a kid) but never went into the forums. Good shit tho, culture feeding on itself is a thing that is almost certainly harming us all.

          • Bloobish [comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            So from Newgrounds you saw a crop of new animators that made parody shorts on popular anime, memes, culture, that kinda shit. Thing is this is all they did, nothing else. You had folks like OneyG, MeatCanyon, etc be spawned from this. This meant that there's no real originality but just "insert funny violent action X lol so random" or "insert disturbing shit about X celebrity/person". This became the entire internet pop cultural discourse in which animators created a self feeding system in which you get the most clicks/views from low grade humor (similar to how most comedy is kinda mid tier today from writers). Thing is these peeps also like to insert misogyny shit, racist shit, gross shit, into their stuff creating a low grade but still present reactionary undercurrent. Overall think of them as another aspect of the internet feeding really bad aspects of humanity similar to how gamergate led to a clusterfuck of hate towards women/lgbtq peeps in gaming. What's sad is you had some cool animators from Newgrounds that either disappeared when they entered the industry or just left.

        • Antoine_St_Hexubeary [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Part of the reason that disappoints me is because a couple of the "A"-list guys from the Newgrounds era (I'm thinking of Neil Cicierega, David Firth, Jonti "Weebl" Picking) actually turned out to be pretty cool. Weebl in particular seems to have had some sort of leftish awakening just over the last year, judging by his Twitter.

            • Antoine_St_Hexubeary [none/use name]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Oh yeah, Russian Dancing Men hits different now.

              Even the guys from that milieu who didn't turn out to be overt leftists (Joel Veitch, The Brothers Chaps) just seem like good-natured guys who, on some level, can't believe they've been allowed to make a living in the animation business, and figure the best way to avoid screwing it up is to just be nice. It would not be the worst thing in the world if every high-profile show-business lib acted like that.

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      15 days ago

      deleted by creator