• HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
    40·
    10 days ago

    Part of me wonders why this hasn’t been supplanted by now. They had smegging branded toothbrushes in the store today.

    It’s not like we haven’t cracked the code of YA literature and non-threating fantasy.

    But I suspect it’s more that it was one of the last major franchises before the hyperbalkanization of media.

    Today, we’re spoiled for choice. You might find some great series about a 17-year-old vampire coming of age during the Long March, but your friend is reading an equally great series where the 14-year-old Princess of The Gryphon Riders uses her powers to solve Kessler Syndrome. You have no shared memes.

    There isn’t a new franchise around with the same “broad cultural currency” and that’s why people remain in its gravity well.

    i can’t imagine we’ll get back to the era when big releases meant midnight openings at every major store with blocks-long queues. Not even a new iDoohickey does it anymore. Yeah, GTA6 will have a few, but it will never be the same “trample the store clerks” energy.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
      23·
      10 days ago

      This is absolutely it.

      Franchises such as Harry Potter were hugely impactful on my generation, and a big part of why is they had such cultural penetration. It’s hard not to be into something when all your friends are talking about it.

      These days we are seeing big movie studios get surprised when their new thing fails to land, making reboot after reboot that isn’t hitting with the under-35 market and then being absolutely blindsided when a movie about The Backrooms does great. It’s literally about a meme. A concept. But memes are about the only shared cultural currency we have left - and even those are far from universal.

      I do think about this phenomenon any time I’m at an event which plays music for a broad crowd, like a wedding. There will be some personal new choices from the bride and groom but the only music that can get everyone up dancing are classic bangers from the 80s through the 2000s. After that we all stopped listening to the radio or buying CDs, and the cultural consciousness dried up.

      I do wonder what weddings will be like another 20 years from now.

    • TotallynotJessicaOPEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      I bought GTA 5 at launch and played it for over a thousand hours, but I’ll probably only play GTA 6 when I’m an old woman so I can experience a place that has been lost to climate change. I have little interest in future Rockstar slop

  • Sanctus@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    36·
    10 days ago

    Yeah theres way more interesting shit, what type of lichen are you?

    I feel like Collema nigrescens because I too lack internal structure.

    • TotallynotJessicaOPEnglish
      7·
      10 days ago

      because slithering are sexy and seductive, griff in door are arrogant assholes, huff and puff are stoners, and rave and claw are the punks who punch terf ass billionaires in the face