What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality. The truth is that superhero movies are the latest incarnation of a type of entertainment which is as old as the oldest human culture we know about. The Iliad is the same kind of entertainment in a different format. Commentators said the same about gladiators chariot races in the Colosseum. There are dick jokes scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.
The childish attitude is making a dichotomy between childish and adult things and criticizing the childish things pretending the latest incarnation is somehow a new kind of thing.
Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.
The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."
You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.
Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.
Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.
And I think the latter point is fair but it's just the cyclical nature of the medium. In the late '80s comic books grew up and got all serious with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and other works that deconstructed the genre. And the early '90s had an unrelated trend where heroes had to be all gritty and edgy, overly-muscular and toting tons of ammunition pouches and automatic weapons. But the genre swung back from the excesses to more optimistic and child-friendly versions.
So maybe we're at a moment in history where superhero comics are a certain way. But it's just a trend that will change.
To your point about the comic book medium, I think it's worth separating the superhero concept from the format it was presented in. I don't think it would have been impossible to bring superheroes into the 80s and 90s, same as we had incorruptible heroes like Robocop. What makes them kid-friendly isn't the artistry or the goriness of the setting, as author pointed out, both Spider-Man and Batman were borne out of death, it's the undying nature of their commitment to fight evil. When you start messing with that you get outside of the capacity of a seven year-old to follow, relate with, and fall in love with it. Has nothing to do with cutesy graphics.
I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.
It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).
You must not have been around for what the 80's/early 90's had churned out. Any number of songs from 2 Live Crew and Too Short make WAP seem tame by comparison.
Despite the moral panic at the time surrounding those groups/artists, we still managed to survive and grow as a country, and especially with regards to free speech.
1. 2 Live Crew and Too Short weren't Billboard #1 artists, they were (perfectly fine) marginal hip hop artists who helped knock down the door on profanity in lyrics.
2. Almost every pop song in the 80s and 90s had no profanity, the ratio was probably 99/1 or higher.
3. As a dad of 4 I can attest that profanity in the top 40 pop charts is waaaaaaaaay up, WAP style songs are mainstream, and I've had to teach my 5 year old to say "radio edit" to Alexa.
I did an informal study, at the end of last year Amazon Music had a "top 100 songs of 2021" playlist, I listened to them all and 44 of them had lyrics I would consider inappropriate for a 5 year old.
I'm not a prude and I'm not making value judgments, but the floodgates have opened on profanity and explicit lyrics, at least in part because of the decline of radio's monopoly, the rise of streaming, the overall fracturing of the monoculture, and the Internet's rewarding of clickbait / extreme behavior.
Over time, the code lost its value and as of ten years ago, no comic company is following it anymore. Good riddance.
Y'all are a bunch of prudes and artists and the leading edge of culture are using that shock people experience in their art and have been for a long damn time. There's this burned in mythos that sex is bad which was brought in by Christianity and despite the goalposts of what is vulgar and what is acceptable there continues to be the undercurrent of "this is awful because it's too explicitly sexual" even though what was too much has shifted from exposed ankles to whatever people are offended by today. Hopefully we're close to running out of things to be offended by and people will just be comfortable with people expressing their sexuality as normal... but I doubt it.
I think the difference here is that it's easy to imagine what is more vulgar than The Simpsons, or more vulgar than Elvis dancing.
I'm struggling to come up with what is more vulgar than some of the stuff that is produced for the mainstream today, without being just pornography.
And the Simpsons stopped getting heat once Bevis and Butthead went on the air and became the new target.
I refer you to Jimmy Swaggart in 1986
>he views rock as “pornography and degenerative filth which denigrates all the values we hold sacred and is destructive to youth.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-03-ca-1235-s...
This is where The New Pornographers got their name
That has nothing to do with infantilization in our culture. The fact that they also had fart and dick jokes in the past has no bearing on this.
The fact that adults in our culture form their identity around low quality super hero movies in a desperate attempt to recapture their youth and seem fun and then run off to buy the little toys from the ads is the infantilization.
Also, while the franchises have moved away from being for young kids anymore I can tell you that my friends who have kids in the teenage bracket certainly bond with them over their shared interest in such movies.
Disclaimer, I don't really sort humor into high brow and low brow per se, and probably listen to a whole lot more than 20 bawdy or indecent jokes in a single day. There are plenty of comedians who are too mean-spirited for my taste though.
I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.
Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.
They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.
They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.
Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.
They are qualitatively different.
The fundamental story structures are quite similar. The scope of the tales told is quite similar. The behaviour of the protagonists and antagonists is quite similar.
We know about the Iliad and the Odyssey because they were relatively well preserved. We don’t know about Homer’s less popular poems, or of any particularly trashy verse that he wrote…because it didn’t survive.
The Iliad survived not because it is transcendent, but because it was popular (which meant that there were more copies made to survive over time). The "transcendence" was added later as a (probably wrong) reason for its popularity.
Some 3,000 years from now there will probably be someone calling the Saga of the Boy Wizard transcendent just the way that people call the Iliad transcendent. They, like many others, will confuse its widespread popularity and many copies with a judgement on quality. There are other similar stories better written that don’t have the popularity of HP. But they won’t survive over time because there weren’t as many copies.
I actually have no information as to the popularity of Homer's work relative to other works at that time. I suppose I have fairly strong intuitions as to its popularity after antiquity, but its popularity at that point seems to cut against your argument somewhat. There were certainly stories that dominated Homer's societal saturation after the fall of the Greek empire, and some of those survived, some not.
The only hobbies that aren't looked down upon are things that involve creation instead of consumption or are major class signifiers really (Opera, skiing, etc).
This does not sound like what people think in general in the US. This sounds like you live in a social circle and assume their opinions as general opinion.
[1] Which, unfortunately for his hopes, turned out to just be a fashion wave in the Upper-Middle and was eventually, partially, incorporated into it—I dunno if he just let optimism get the better of him, or truly didn't recognize totally normal Bohemianism when he saw it.
I think you may be on to something. Perhaps it's because it feels worse when it is highly intelligent and otherwise reasonable people wasting their time.
And I wonder what it all means. As a species we've been at this since the first cave paintings, the earliest oral traditions. And what we're doing now with modern hyperstimulating computer-generated mediums is in that same tradition. But from a biological standpoint, what do these intellectual forms of recreation really mean for us? Is the final goal of our society to automate away all of the hard physical stuff, and then place our bodies in comfortable pods where our only stimulation is the simulated and safe? To play out stories and to experience emotions where we have minimized our vulnerability and maximized our enjoyment? "All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."
This isn't meant to be a condemnatory dystopian vision or anything. I just wonder if the ideal end state of luxury existence is to live in stories, so the mind and passions can work, but the body is satiated and at peace. So when people indulge in leisure now, is that truly "wasting their time"? Perhaps they are only capturing a fleeting glimpse of the final future of our species.
Now they have to go find some still obscure interest to invest their time in if they hope to retain their nerd status, otherwise they're just into mass culture like the rest of the lowest common denominator.
Nothing was "taken" from the nerds, except social stigma. They're still reading comics and watching anime and superhero movies, and playing D&D and video games, etc. They're still nerds even if what they love is more popular than it ever was.
Hipsters are nerds.
Oh, there is. There's a whole school of thought that is basically non-stop hand-wringing about how superheroes are displacing religion, and We Must Take Back Our Media from those Hollywood heathens and so on.
Stupid, yes. But dangerous too - book-burning season looks like it is just getting started, they already are going after Disney, and those people seem geared up for a serious push.
They aren't going after Disney because of adult infantilization, but the opposite - introducing kids to adult concepts in a particularly politically motivated way that makes them not a good source of kids entertainment in the opinion of many adults.
The comic books that Disney Marvel has produced are 98% low quality poorly written poorly drawn trash, and their movies mostly ok until now (except we seem to be getting into the girl-boss post success phase of the MCU and I expect a downturn).
The issue with Disney is their attempt to become a source of propaganda for social policies aimed towards people's kids, and their choice to be vocal about wanting to influence laws being passed the government in Florida. Their choice, but they also reap the consequences.
Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself? Or something else (or mixture of those trends?)
Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that. A large part of their audience really wants to see them (and corporations in general) take a stand on certain issues, and Disney doesn't want to lose them by keeping silent. Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.
Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc
I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.
>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that
I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202
>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.
They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.
The Star Wars sequel movies were all written and directed by white men but something something girlboss ruined it for you.
It just seems to me you have some ideological grudge that has little to do with the movies.
This is a very strange statement. Movies are media. Ideology has a lot to do with media.
I'm not saying that's how all movies are made, it's not. But for a massive global mega corp like Disney I don't think that a particular political or social ideology is the driving force behind the content. If leadership thought that different content would make them more money, they'd find people willing to make that content.
Taking Disney as an example, if they actually wanted to push an ideology-- let's say one that's in line with their statements against HB 1557, then they wouldn't be running tours in Egypt or other countries that have anti-LGBT laws, or at least would be making similar condemnations of them. [1]
They say & do-- or don't say & do-- whatever they think will keep the money flowing. If they can't avoid being drawn into a social or political issue, they'll say whatever they think will best mitigate the damage of being involved. It's little different than the significant rise of greenwashing over the last couple of decades. That's as much of a social & political statement as well, but I don't actually believe the company means it.
[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/disney-expanding-operat...
I'm not so sure about that. They faced backlash over their attempt to mostly stay out of the issue with Florida's HB 1557 bill. That initial reaction tells me they (leadership) probably didn't want any part of it. That had its own backlash & so they tried to appease their critics, but I still think their initial reaction was as "honest" a response as we would get from a massive global corporation.
I'm curious what you consider likeable or registering as real. As compared to, say, Batman.
What is wrong with this? Plenty of private corporations lobby the government.
Frightening, but not at all surprising.
Once they became intentionally political they entered the political arena.
And they're free to talk and also free to catch the consequences of their speech - isn't that what I keep hearing?
That's the culture-warrior's way of saying, "we're cancelling Disney because they protested that we were cancelling gay people."
> Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That's not cancelling gay people at large. That's preventing the schools from talking to third-graders or younger (8 years old or younger) about these things and letting their parents do it if they choose.
You might disagree with the bill, but Disney is taking a political stance, and does not deserve to have special political privileges if they take any form of political stance, regardless on what the political stance is.
Wait, who said this? Corporations lobby the government all the time. They absolutely have political stances. Sometimes these stances are transparently about making them money, and sometimes they're (ostensibly) not, but it would deny reality to claim that they shouldn't have political stances. Maybe you feel that they shouldn't, but it's tilting at windmills.
This is beside the point of whether they should have "special political privileges". Maybe no corporation should have "special political privileges". But in a world where they do, it's strange to confer them conditional on what has never been the case (companies not taking political positions).
edit:
"The Florida bill never even mentions the word 'gay'."
That statement does not make you sound very serious. The bill obviously involves -- at a deep level -- the concept of "gay" whether or not it uses that particular word.
If one cannot talk about why Joe has two mommies and no daddies, or why Jane's mom should now be called dad (necessary consequences of the "don't say gay" bill - and very much intended by the bigots behind the bill and behind those bigots who support the bill), then one is _erasing_ gay people from society.
My 62-year-old brother-in-law tells me that knew he was gay (but didn’t have a word for it) from about 6 years old. He still had to go through a bunch of figuring out what that meant, but if society hadn’t been stuck where it was when he was 6, he may have saved himself a lot of pain growing up.
As a side note: I have an 8-year-old son. I tried to explain a bit about this sort of thing, but just explaining about how adults are attracted to each other is something he is simply not ready to understand. Trying to explain sex to him at this point would just be confusing.
The problem is that some parents do not think that it is ok that someone has two dads, and really want to go back to the days when "those people" would be socially shamed and that shaming was supported by what is taught in school. And the governor of Florida, and his compatriots in that states legislative body agree with them (or are at least willing to play this for political points).
I happen to think that we should accept people's choices about who they think are family (there are extremes on this, and I am less certain about my stance the farther you go). And to some degree our laws and the court's interpretation of that have solidified that as the law of the land. Once we are there, pretty much the only thing that schools can reasonably do is to teach these "new" forms of family as normal. Yes that is against what some parents want, but if they want their kids not to be exposed to this then they better be taking care of their kids education themselves (homeschool or paying for private schools).
How many?
Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).
Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(
The trouble is that after Moore completely deconstructed super hero comics with Watchmen (and Miracle Man, and Miller with Dark Knight, etc.), a new generation thought that's how comics were supposed to be.
But Moore demonstrated that if you extrapolate how super humans would operate in "the real world", it would quickly devolve into a nightmare no one would want to live in.
So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless. Watchmen did it better than any of the current authors, and reading them just leads to getting depressed about the depravity of our fantasy worlds, on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.
Probably the best cape thing I have come across since Watchmen.
She triggers, not with super-strength or flying or lasers, but with the ability to control all bugs in a large radius around herself.
The world is darker than in planetary in that society is trying to cope with supervillains (people who trigger are often in bad situations that don't lead them to becoming superheros) as well as the Endbringers, three seemingly unstoppable monsters who alternate attacking a city every ~3 months and thus society needs supervillains to help combat them.
It's a long read, and I haven't read it in recent years so I can't remember how good the writing was. I enjoyed it. Never read the sequel since its about a different character that I didn't really care about.
Planetary is not really in the same vein of story.
Reminds me of the sheer number of times I've seen "clever" people give a dark, gritty take on Alice in Wonderland. The weird thing to do with that material is give it an unironically bright, sunny, upbeat interpretation. If the surface of the original material isn't "dark", it sure isn't hiding very deeply under the surface.
That's one take. When I got into comics as a young adult, it wasnt depressing, indulgent, or defeating. It was a window look at some of the darker aspects of reality and explore and form opinions on them. I could have conversations with friends about the totalitarian state depicted in V for Vendetta or zero-sum politics and fascism in transmetropolitan.
It let me experience exaggerated possible worlds that I would not want to live in and that I was sheltered from in real life. It helped me form ideals and ideas about what I don't want in life.
Probably the only comic that I had a negative impact on me that I wasn't over able to overcome reframe as a cautionary tale was cerebus the aardvark. It certainly colored the world view of several of my friends, sending some into levels of mild depression. It contained some seriously unsettling takes on life, relationships, and women that were hard to shake, and I'm still not sure I have 15 years later.
Comics are alive and well in non-western comic traditions. It's the big two (Marvel,DC) as well some some smaller companies like IDW that can't produce stories people want to read on a regular basis.
Maybe it's just that as kids, we didn't recognize these things as being so politically charged as we do in our adulthood. Perhaps it's because as kids, it just seemed like common sense that these things shouldn't even be controversial so much as just being obviously bad things against which a hero would fight. It's hard to maintain a kid's perspective on things when we leave our kid years.
Edit: wording.
Besides, good literature isn't supposed to hit you with their message so hard. Good literature isn't a blunt instrument to be wielded like some dullard wielding a sledge hammer in a slaughter house. It's a gentle and subtle poison that changes your mind from the inside. V for Vendetta is a great example. On the outside it just shows how government is corrupt, but it also shows the risks of human experimentation, the problems of corporate and government cooperation, how easily people are swayed by a compliant media, how easily small things in the beginning can have huge consequences far down the line that were never suspected, even in a time of conflict and rage the need for human connection is important... and all of these things are laid out in the sub plot of a comic book. Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken =)
Image comics was never owned by Marvel - it was founded when 7 of the big marvel/DC artists realized they didn't need marvel to publish them and left to do their own thing. Each artist had his own company (like Silvestri's Top Cow, Liefeld's Extreme Studios, Todd Mcfarlane's Todd Mcfarlane Productions, Jim Lee's Wildstorm, etc). Image's job was to act as a publisher that took minimal financial value from the project away from the creators, and didn't own any of the IP.
DC comics did have some smaller publishing houses - Vertigo comics, Wildstorm Comics after they bought it from Jim Lee, etc. Vertigo owned IP so it wasn't creator owned stuff, and I think Wildstorm was a mix. Vertigo imploded after a woke reboot that lasted from 2018-2019, and DC consolidated its adult oriented lines to DC Black Label.
Marvel had Icon Comics with creator owned stuff like Kick Ass (that later got a movie) but it was really about stopping Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar (netflix acquired Millarworld Limited in 2017) from shopping those IPs out to other places.
>good literature isn't supposed
99.99% of comic book writers today don't know how to write good comics, let alone good literature. DC has imploded and gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and there are very few of the people who were involved with the comics you remember left there anymore. Marvel is happy to make garbage if it hires people with the right diversity checkboxes (see Vita Ayala, who somehow keeps getting more work while being completely unable to write stories people want to read).
>V for Vendetta
Originally published in the UK, later put out by Vertigo Comics (DC) in its hayday. But Alan Moore is better writer than almost everyone left at either of the big comics houses these days, and he was writing in a time where it was less culturally acceptable to write blunt propaganda into comic books.
>Again, from the 80's /sigh ... it was a freer time, when risks could be taken
This is because our society has switched. In the 80s the left was fighting right wing christian censorship and largely winning. Today we have inverted.
No kidding! Today I learned. Thanks... I really thought they opened this up to hold on some of these artists (specifically McFarland, who was notoriously hard to work with). =)
You bemoan the consumption of video games and superhero fiction as low value content. And you don’t blame their formats, but their content. But is that right? Past generations were dominated by all sorts of cheap, disposable entertainment- soap operas, radio shows, pulp fiction. What do yearly superhero films resemble? The serial films that arrived at the beginning of cinema. Is this base content really so much baser than the entertainment of the past?
Here's an idea: being an adult shouldn't be one dimensional. I can play with legos, play video games, read scifi and fantasy, and also raise my son, renovate my house, and, I dunno, wrestle bears? Conquer nations? Drink beer and yell at the TV about sports? Or maybe it is denigration of others that you think is the hobby real men do. If so, you're correct, I'm just a child then with my silly belief that people getting joy from activities is a good thing.
Also, there's plenty for kids to get into these days, including comics, books, video games, and whatever. More than I had when I was a kid.
Car enthusiasts are mostly about making something look cool and have certain stats, it’s about fun not utility.
I won't tell others how to live their lives, but I think this has more value than how to optimally crush candies for example
All 4 examples main benefit is knowledge to be used later.
People who fish with a pole rarely catch more than the investment made into their gear and bait.
I'm sure others will disagree but I believe playing video games for hours is more infantilizing than hunting, fishing, or tinkering on cars.
The former is content designed by humans (generally working under the aegis of giant corporations) whose goal is to completely capture and dominate your attention to the exclusion of other things. While videogames certainly can be and often are art that tells interesting stories about the human condition, they also often function psychologically much more like junk food and drugs. They give you just enough serotonin hit to get you to keep playing but rarely enough to leave you truly sated. Many games don't want to satisfy because then you'll stop consuming the content.
Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally. They are both boring in a deeply useful way that gives you time to reflect and process your own thoughts. Instead of doom scrolling social media which constantly fills your brain with new information, stressors, and problems that you never have time to sift through, hunting and fishing give your brain the idle time it needs to finally start defragging its memory.
Tinkering on cars forces you to solve difficult challenges. Unlike playing videogames where the stakes are by design relatively low—all you can lose is time—working on a car forces you to confront difficulty and failure where that matters. You can break parts that are expensive to replace. You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.
All three of these engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands in an integrated, much deeper way than a controller and rectangle of pixels does. The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.
This is something we all know intuitively and it's the constant onslaught of capitalism and the ease of consuming media at home that makes us forget. Videogames can certainly have moments of meaningful joy. But ask yourself this: How often after sinking an hour into a game do you find yourself thinking, "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?
For me, 80% of the time I spend playing videogames or watching dumb social media leaves me with the same lingering regret I feel when I eat a bag of chips instead of preparing an actually nutritious meal.
I think this very well might be the major difference between those pursuits and screen media. The latter can not yet both simulate those experiences and stimulate the body at the same time.
This distinction between physical experiences from those that solely stimulate the mind, I feel, is the only way you can prioritize the worthiness of one over the other. Certainly it feels exhausting to have consumed a bunch of content that stimulated the mind while the body was immobile the entire time, yes. But I think any further value judgments between the two are subject and based on one's own moral philosophy. In many cases, examples of the "real" can be as morally judged against. For instance, the idea of billionaires and politicians buying lavish ranches and then mugging for the camera while they're playacting as farmers and cowboys when they are just living out a caricature of real labor.
If the key difference between the physical and the purely intellectual is the lack of effects on the former, one wonders if the end goal will be to be able to stimulate the body while the mind is being stimulated (even if only by simulation), or deeper and invasive forms of mind stimulation that make it appear as if the body has been stimulated as well. Rest assured, our top giant corporations are working on this problem even as we speak.
So all of modern TV is the same? Is watching cable news infantilizing? I feel like we're watering down to "infantilizing" to mean "things I don't feel good things towards".
> Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally.
Again, this whole paragraph is unrelated to the question, right? Physical activity is related to those things a well, but people would argue that playing a game of hopscotch is childish. As well, my grandfather isn't what I would describe as the picture of mental health.
> You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.
I mean, you just described computer tinkering and problem solving as well.
> The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.
Again, the topic is infantilizing. You're romanticizing.
> "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?
Never? I sincerely hated fishing growing up and have found I'm not much of a hiker.
I believe that spending significant time on things that aren't meaningfully enriching and tend to leave you feeling regretful is immature. Obviously, everyone needs some time to veg. I'm not saying everyone's gotta be trying to level up and hustle 24/7.
But if you're spending hours every day watching superhero shows you don't really care about or grinding videogames alone with little sense of accomplishment, I think that demonstrates a lack of maturity that I would consider infantile. And I deeply believe that the aforementioned media is designed to make you do that. These shows and games are deliberately structured for binging and grinding. They want you to turn off your executive reasoning and get you to make short-term selfish choices around comfort and complacency. They want consumers.
So, in that sense, yes, I believe that media is infantilizing.
Both in the process of tinkering, and out of frustration when stuff goes wrong. So, also developing a bit of anger management skill. :)
I prefer video games over most outdoors activities but still largely agree with you.
One minor critique is that I would substitute "infantilizing" for "psychologically beneficial." I also think the gap in inherent value between the two groups of activities could be summarized into the tendency of screen-based activities to produce instant gratification with minimal discernible gain. The latter group activities involve aspects of mindfulness and require a degree of active physical/mental labor over time, therefore you could argue less "outdoor-sy" creative efforts like painting, long-form writing, or sewing could all provide the same benefits.
I believe they're designed to do that, which is why I think they're infantilizing. They encourage us to do adopt an unhealthy short-term gratification selfish comfort mindset.
Wow, that escalated quickly. TIL I'm Hitler.
I don't think this is at all "something we all know intuitively". It also applies to basically any kind of content consumption, including reading books, listening to opera, or watching any kind of cinema. These don't "engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands", and yet they can be valuable activities that enrich us greatly. At the same time I don't get a lot out of sitting around in a boat for hours; if I want to be left alone to my thoughts I'd rather be on a walk (which I'd argue doesn't necessarily engage my entire body either -- I'm generally lost in thought and have no idea what my body's doing while on a walk).
There's really nothing special about an activity being tactile. I can solve a problem in my own head without touching a damned thing. And watching good movies, or playing good video games, can engage my imagination and help me be more empathic or a better problem solver.
Also, I can play video games without brutally murdering a living creature that feels pain, so that's nice.
I really do, in the same way that a satisfying nutritious meal feels different after you're done eating it than a meal of junk food does.
> It also applies to basically any kind of content consumption, including reading books, listening to opera, or watching any kind of cinema.
I was pretty careful to say that not all "content" is like this (though anything that we'd naturally refer to as "content" instead of a "work of art" is probably telling us something). It's certainly the case that there are books, films, shows, and videogames that are meaningful and enriching. There's also 50 Shades of Gray, whatever Michael Bay's latest thing is, Jersey Shore, and Candy Crush.
The form of the media isn't the point, it's the merit of the actual content.
> These don't "engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands", and yet they can be valuable activities that enrich us greatly.
Sure, not every meaningful activity has to tick every box. But it's good to spend your time on things that tick at least some of them. Binge watching completely forgettable superhero series or grinding pointless quests on an MMO are doing little more than fast-forwarding someone towards their death. I of course respect their choice to do that, but my opinion is that choosing to spend signicant time doing that is infantile, just as eating chicken tendies and soda for every meal is.
> At the same time I don't get a lot out of sitting around in a boat for hours; if I want to be left alone to my thoughts I'd rather be on a walk (which I'd argue doesn't necessarily engage my entire body either -- I'm generally lost in thought and have no idea what my body's doing while on a walk).
I only used those specific examples because those are the ones the parent comment used. Find whatever activities are meaningful and rewarding to you. I just hope you're able to find some instead of burning your free time in a mindless fugue of media consumption which is all too easy to do these days.
> I can play video games without brutally murdering a living creature that feels pain, so that's nice.
If you've ever seen me fish, you'd know that harm to fish is rarely involved. In fact, most days there is no fish participation at all.
Playing video games is occasionally associated with the NEET crowd, likely because of the low barrier to entry in terms of experience.
Exploring nature and working on mechanical things requires some prior knowledge, experience and/or space to get started.
Likewise, access to uncontaminated nature in large population centres is harder than it was when rural populations outnumbered the people living in urban environments.
Bikes, on the other hand, are great for tinkering and also small enough to be compatible with modern living. These, however, might not be accessible for someone with a low level of fitness and willpower to attain that fitness.
There is a fair amount of good content, in both video games and comic books. Both are fairly reasonably considered art. I don't see a lot of people saying we should destroy art museums because they're escapism.
Yes, there's a lot of bad video games and comic books, too. But I dare say exactly that is true of arts, books, and a variety of other things people widely consider worthwhile forms of entertainment.
The entire point of the transition from childhood to adulthood is that you become responsible for yourself and others which is a transition from you being the responsibility of others.
The idea that responsibilities are somehow an injustice has dominated thinking of my generation and latter. I really enjoy playing a round of Elden Ring after I've gotten all my house work done and taken care of the things that people rely on me for. Just on the basic standards of household maintenance I'm shocked how often my friends apartments look like they are lived in by a teenager.
The whole idea of "ghosting" is another example of this bizarre inability to just do the things you need to do. Being an "adult" in just about any culture, means you do somethings that are uncomfortable because those things need to be done. Sure it can be hard to tell some people "no" but ignoring them completely because you can't stand a bit of discomfort is the very essence of "childish" behavior.
I grew up in a dysfunctional household, where I was not taken care of as a child, so I was very eager to become an adult. Taking responsibility and taking care of myself where things I looked forward to because I'd be taken care of, even if I was the one doing it.
Now that climate change is starting to show undeniable consequences it's a bit hard for me to take demands for climate action seriously from people who just a few months ago complained about "adulting" when doing their own taxes in their late 20s.
What if I told you I ghost people because I don't care and it has nothing to do with maturity.
I experience 0 discomfort cutting ties and relationships with people that I've moved on from or didn't see myself interacting with in the first place. I find no grace in extending interactions to make some people feel better that feel like they're owed conversation or an explanation. What's so wrong with just moving on? If someone doesn't gel with you or reply, you should really just take the hint. Or would it be better for me to be honest and say something like, "Sorry, I just find you intolerable once I got to know you, so I think it's better if you don't talk to me anymore, thank you!"
I think it's childish to expect everyone to give you the time of day in a world where we are busier than ever before. I'd prefer to be ghosted by people who decide to ghost me.
Most people complain about "adulting" do it in jest or use it as a device to insult the job their parents did of teaching them important skills. I raised myself and I never complain about "adulting" but find it fun to groan about becoming older.
I think when you reach the age of like 25, you realize that you don't have a clue, and the "adults" around you mostly don't have a clue either.
But it's always been like that. It is in fact a childish view to conceive of adulthood as some fundamentally different stage of life where everything changes and you've got it all figured out.
The real difference with past generations is that you were expected and able to slot into a rigid social order, to fill a certain role. That rigidity has partly been rejected, and is partly simply out of reach due to economic factors.
high quality comics targeted at adults have existed in europe for decades. there was no infantilization there. and the fact that i enjoy playing videogames occasionally allows me to spend quality time with my children in ways that my parents never could.
But playing sport leads to all kinds of benefits like getting exercise, socializing and developing bonds with others, overcoming adversity, fresh air, a feeling of increasing mastery over time.
I imagine writing and drawing comics would have similar mental health benefits (if not the exercise and fresh air).
The problem for many of us (myself included) is consuming vs. producing.
If you had a time machine and went back a couple thousand years, I think you'd find that people already did unproductive things for entertainment.
And people have probably been disapproving of younger generations enjoying the wrong entertainment for about as long as we've done things for entertainment.
I have a liking for the current crop of superhero stuff because its light-hearted. The tone is hopeful. (It's ironic, honestly, that the article goes on about the mature/miserable nature of current superhero stuff when the flagship Marvel stuff is all pretty positive, with the exception of the ten-year culmination of the Avengers storyline they cite). It's a nice break from worrying about the real world, which these days seems to have this constant, vague, oppressive feeling of inevitable doom. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but the universal problems around corruption, collective action issues, personal wealth above general good, etc. is tiring and depressing.)
Maturity is, in my opinion, a function of one's perception of the consequences of their actions and how they weigh said consequences. An immature person, regardless of their hobbies behaves like a child when they don't consider e.g. the feelings of other people or the harm they impose onto others. As we get older and accumulate more experiences through interactions with other people, we tend to take into consideration a far longer and wider horizon. This usually happens by increasing one's responsibilities as they become older.
What-ho!
So you think they should move on to an "adult" hobby like stamp collecting or model trains?
This comment complains that adults are somehow children because they engage with entertainment formats that were traditionally geared towards children.
Why do you care what other men do with their spare time?
Maybe spend less time thinking about what other people ought to enjoy and find something that makes you happy.
Look, I consume all of this cultural junk food you mentioned. But at least I recognise it as such.
The fact that others are in a so vehement denial about it just shows EXACTLY how right you are. Minds of childs.
You can literally use that argument for everything.
"Why don't gay people just shut up and stay in the closest for the benefit of societal cohesion? So egoistic."
"People who are afraid of covid are so self centered and would rather shut down entire societies than to self sacrifice a bit!! Why should we accomodate the hypochondriacs"
And as a muslim your comment, ironically enough, reminds me of how some neocons excused discriminating against Muslims. "Wow I mean there are terrorists out there and we should care about "muh freedomz" for Muslims? After 9/11? Well discriminating and targeting all Muslims is just a small sacrifice for the greater good of our society, it's just the rational thing to do."
There's absolutely no merit to that type of argument. obviously anyone fighting for "mah freedum" as you call it will always be ridiculed and not taken seriously by everyone, by definition. The only thing different and unique this time is the honestly troubling trend of mocking and belittling the concept of freedom or rights in general, just to "own the other side". I'm sure that normalizing such a dangerous rhetoric won't turn against you eventually.
Well, if we're going to go reaching for the fallacy labels -- that's a pretty textbook appeal to extremes. Discrimination against any portion of the population is reprehensible. But the big moral challenge is determining what exactly constitutes discrimination. Where is the line between just punishment under the law, and discrimination?
Society's laws are designed to protect the interests of everyone in that society (without discrimination!) from those around them that would hurt them, whether through malice or negligence. Implicit in those laws is the idea that you seem to be protesting: that in certain situations, Person A knows better than Person B what's good for Person B. Or, as it may be, what liberties to withhold from Person B to protect others from them. That's prison. And as fucked up and inhumane as I think the American prison system is, I don't know whether it's really possible to have a society without _some_ sort of way of withholding certain rights from people for the protection of others.
And yes, that line of thinking absolutely can (and does) slide down the hellchute into totalitarianism. Avoiding either extreme of that spectrum is the challenge of living in a democracy (or what masquerades as one these days).
Obviously my comment was an appeal to extremes (though honestly, the part about discriminating against muslim was literally was a common talking point). But that was exactly to show how smug and dismissive the argument was.
[citation needed]
Not that I have that wisdom myself. I only think I might arrive at that conclusion eventually.
Many people who are individualists advocate for self-sacrifice and service as virtues, freely chosen.
Virtue under threat of punishment or retaliation is not virtue at all.
I'm not a conservative, myself, but it's kinda crazy to watch from a distance. Especially in the current context of watching Ukrainians fighting on the battlefield, Poles giving up half their homes, etc. to refugees from Ukraine, etc.
EDIT: also, it isn't restricted to the USA. It has been on full display here in Canada, and in Europe as well.
And before you say that it was nothing out of the ordinary, remember that even during the Oka Crisis the federal government did not take such extreme measures. That was a multi week armed standoff with hundreds of armed combatants, killed police officers, led to a very damaging blockade around montreal. Yet, no charter was suspended and the federal government did not do everything to antagonize the Mohawks. Pretty crazy compared to what happened in ottawa.
So there is definitely a reason to be worried, and saying that it's worse somewhere else is irrelevant. Or do we just dismiss any social justice movement too since wow, they are complaining about trivial stuff compared to the sacrifice ukrainians are making?
Listen, I'm 48 years old and have been protesting since I was a teen. I've been teargassed, pepper sprayed, charged by horse mounted police, faced a line of riot cops. Mostly after said protest went, maybe, I dunno, one hour past what its permitted time was or beyond some fenced area, or encroached near where a gov't figure was. I wasn't at it, but for kicks some time, google "g20 kettling toronto" and see what happened to protesters peacefully sitting in the middle of an intersection in Toronto in a vaguely festive atmosphere when the police decide to go completely apeshit and actually really violate people's charter rights.
These anti-vax "protesters" blocked two international border crossings, harassed people in downtown Ottawa, blasted horns, kept stores closed, displayed hate speech and flags, threatened public officials, kept illegal firearms, the list goes on. For weeks. Many weeks. 24/7.
"supend the charter" -- much more extreme measures have been taken against myself and others I've protested with -- they just didn't bother to "suspend the charter" officially before doing it. They just did it. Threw people in detention, searched their crap illegally, whatever they felt like doing. Because that's what police do to actual protesters, as opposed to wanky authoritarian far-right neo-fascists that they publicly sympathize with.
They didn't suspend the charter in the Oka crisis because they didn't need to. They just tear gassed, used concussion grenades, arrested and beat people (Ronaldo Casalpro) in captivity. Or used bayonets on them (Waneek Horn-Miller).
The charter had to be "suspended" and governments were forced to intervene because the police refused to do their job... a job they are far far too eager to exercise when it's people they don't agree with.
Charter is a piece of paper.
And yeah sure the charter is just a piece of paper, but again I'm not sure what's your point. You are basically arguing that we might as well not even try. Remember that that piece of paper will be used against you and I'm not sure how far that "it's just a piece of paper!" Argument will go with a judge. The Charter is extremely weak, but this is still an unprecedented reaction in the post war western world. Over a bunch of truckers and 0 violence.
Also, you are repeating literal fake news. The guy with the nazi flag lasted for a few minutes before getting kicked out by the rest of the protesters. Again, if you participated in the g20 protests and cannot see how easy it is to plant agitators or use one off events to justify discrediting a whole protest...
My point here is that no matter what's your stance on the vaccine (and I'm extremely pro vaccine, I probably went in person with more than a dozen of my friends and co-workers to get them vaccinated if they were afraid/hesitant), the rhetoric around the trucker rally is extremely dangerous. It is setting a precedent, and next time we get a first nation protest/blockade, or a BLM protest (both of which I usually support) under a more conservative government, let's hope that the charter won't be seen as just a piece of paper again.
It probably seems like America is getting divided more starkly, but to outsiders its just more of the same from a country that had a civil war over slavery. It waxes and wanes but it never really goes away.
Cryptocurrencies make their inevitable appearance in the thread! :]
And in other quarters, they believe we have permanent, irreconcilable differences based on race, sex, and sexuality making the whole idea of "out of many, one" unthinkable.
Maybe for you, not for me. I live life to serve myself above all else. It so happens that helping people I care about also serves me, because it makes me happy. But "for the greater good" is an incredibly toxic, near cult-like mentality that should absolutely not be encouraged without nuance.
The only enormous time and energy sink I’ve seen that’s completely universal and worse than marvel movies or funko pops is Posting — random grown adults online that have been told that their opinions should hold sway over other random adults online because of the sheer value of their opinions. For every sad weirdo with a room full of expensive anime figurines, there are hundreds of sad, weird Facebook Aunts espousing “the importance of traditional values and maybe urine therapy”
It’s like we’ve all got a new commonality. It used to be eating, shitting, pissing, fucking and sleeping. Now it’s that plus “screaming into an uncaring void”
Some will probably argue that it's wonderful, finally we allow ourselves to let the inner child blossom and bloom into adulthood. It just seems to me that it is the worst parts of the inner child that we indulge: Escapist, shirking responsibility, partial to instant gratification rather than deeper pursuits. I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.