truly this is the most challenging of online media.
I edited my comment to be less mean but I’ve decided to stop. You are in your 30s, you should be consuming more challenging media than TADC. That shit about cartesian dualism or whatever is fucking cope about a plotline that’s one step removed from Sword Art Online. You are what people are talking about when they complain about emotionally stunted adult children.
Personally, I would dismiss anyone complaining about “emotionally stunted adult children” out of hand as a form of reactionary nonsense. “Arrested development”, by which I mean people being stuck in life situations seemingly broadly unchanged since high school, and left unable to attain any of the typical markers of adulthood, is an issue that impacts countless people; but it is a systemic issue of our mode of production literally pricing people out of adulthood. This issue won’t get solved by yelling at strangers over the Internet for watching cartoons — doing so is counterproductive in fact! The cartoons, as a matter of fact, are a complete “goddam” non-issue, unless you’re already fully programmed into some depressing idea of “adulthood” meaning that one must become a drone of capital that decries any form of whimsy or creativity, because you need to appear Sophisticated™ and Mature™ at all times. Are we really going to return to the brony struggle session of 2023?
There’s a difference between “everything must be serious at all times” and “people need to nurture the ability to be serious”. My contention is that a specific internet show has really obvious, on the nose writing, and that if that’s still your benchmark for good writing by the time you hit your thirties then you have failed as a critical consumer of media.
There’s a difference between “everything must be serious at all times” and “people need to nurture the ability to be serious”.
I said that I like a show, and then provided some context for why other people around my age find it appealing. Then you barged in to tell me I’m immature because you don’t find the character development or writing (aspects I didn’t even mention) is up to your Mature Adult standards.
My contention is that a specific internet show has really obvious, on the nose writing,
that’s not even something I’d disagree with. It’s a high-concept cartoon, not a novel.
if that’s still your benchmark for good writing
I didn’t say that I hold the show up as a benchmark for good writing. You are hallucinating more than chatgpt
then you have failed as a critical consumer of media.
You went at them for talking about a cartoon on the assumption that cartoons are the only media they consume. That’s pretty fucking provocative. Also rude and uncalled for.
I have taken a few hours to do some fun things and hopefully calm myself down a bit, lest I get unnecessarily fired up about a cartoon I haven’t even seen more than a few minutes of and didn’t particularly like from that limited experience. What I’ll say is that there is a valid point that you’re trying to make, which is that people shouldn’t be reading only YA until they’re 35. I would agree that people need to challenge themselves and “nurture the ability to be serious.” But your actually valid point here is just getting completely muddied by this whole condescending superiority complex you have, the brainworms around age making you unnecessarily hostile, and also that you assume what other people mean instead of letting them explain themselves. I did actually click like on your first comment: I thought you were being very unnecessarily condescending, and the person you were replying to was in their right to tell you to fuck off for that, but if you’d just left your comment at you finding the writing in TADC to be too on the nose with the characters always spelling out their feelings, then that would’ve been a perfectly valid critique of the work. I mean, I’ve heard people say that Moby Dick is on the nose with its symbolism, and it is! All the symbolism in that book is spelled out for you, yet it’s still considered a classic and I’ve enjoyed it. I also find House, MD to have very on the nose writing with the characters’ emotions being constantly spelled out for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like House, it just means that that aspect of it does irritate me a bit. And I thought at first that when you said “baby’s first”, you were referring to the writers, not the viewers — because the writing in TADC is going to suffer a bit from the fact that it’s an independent production, right? My understanding is that projects like TADC are made at least partially to build portfolios for the people who work on them, so the most masterful episodic writing won’t be found in independent animation of any kind, writers in independent animation are still finding their footing and honing their skills. But no, you were referring to the viewers as babies!
All that Doubtingtammy said was “the overall plot explores cartesian skepticism/dualism, much like the Matrix (and I Have No Mouth…)” — which is a very different claim from saying that TADC is a “benchmark for good writing”: that claim is entirely your own invention pulled from thin air. Doubtingtammy didn’t even assert that they thought that TADC explored those themes well or even intentionally, just that they thought that the themes were there, and likely inspired by those previous works, and a reason why they found it surprising that young people liked the show. We can maybe infer that Doubtingtammy thought that those themes were explored “well” in TADC, but “well” in what sense? “Well” for a work of contemporary independent animation, or “well” for any work of fiction in any genre or medium, ever? Doubtingtammy didn’t specify, but I would’ve assumed the former, and I guess you must’ve assumed the latter and just run with your interpretation. The least you could’ve done is asked why Doubtingtammy had that reading of the work instead of jumping right to calling them an emotionally stunted adult baby. Isn’t critical consumption of media all about backing up your analysis using the text?!
In conclusion, I want to say that there doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between enjoying “mature” and “immature” things. I’m assuming that Doubtingtammy has read a lot more books and seen a lot more shows and movies than just the ones mentioned in their first comment, and many of those unmentioned works probably are things you’d consider much more well-written than TADC. People should learn to read more than just YA, but that doesn’t mean losing the ability to enjoy YA! YA doesn’t have to become boring just because there are other things you can read, you just need to be able to appreciate YA for what it is. You know? Like, I like Ante (1975) for what it is — a groundbreaking representation of Sámi issues in the popular culture of Norway — but that doesn’t mean I think a 70s live action kids’ show is the best thing since sliced bread, it really isn’t.
It’s just a good thing that some people are able to like things that other people can’t.
Revisiting this after reading through a few hours ago. Really good points made here.
As a tangent it feels like this debate over YA versus “mature” art echoes the Socialist Realism era in which art was intentionally pushed to be relatable and intelligible to the average working person. This was in response to centuries of high-brow and inaccessible art being the only admissible art, an emblem of class barriers and the intentional obfuscation and gatekeeping. The thought was, no, art doesn’t have to be inscrutable and “nuanced”, it can and maybe should be direct. I would love for an actual art historian to add more to this since it’s just my basic understanding.
Quite beside these points about realism, I think there are other reasons that adults today might reach for (apparently) children’s media that has less to do with an adult’s individual arrested development, and more to do with their daily alienation and social invalidation of their emotions and struggle within capitalism. Kids shows usually do a lot of emotional validation which makes them alluring for alienated adults also.
Don’t want to dox my age, but I am very much an adult and I’ve recently got into One Piece and Pokémon, so these ideas have been on my mind anyway. I feel happier since starting these shows, so I don’t care if they’re not adult shows
The thing about alienation driving people to kids’ media has been on my mind too lately, as a long-term fan of kids’ cartoons who recently read The Catcher in the Rye. — I mean, becoming an adult means being thrown into this whole alienating machine that is being a worker under capitalism, right? And this fact practically gives working class adults a pathological fixation on the people who haven’t yet been thrown into the capitalist machine, namely children, and by extent children’s things. The form this fixation takes varies between adults based on their individual circumstance and disposition, like some people might proudly be fans of children’s media, some people might bitterly despise children out of envy, whatever it may be; but the fixation is always there and cut from the same cloth in any case, because being an adult necessarily means existing in relationship to children as an individual actor in the social institution of age, no different from how men are pathologically fixated on women, cis people on trans people, the unracialized on the racialized, et cetera.
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around―nobody big, I mean―except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff―I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.” —Holden Caulfield
My perspective of art these days is that everyone, by virtue of being a human with an inner world, has a creative spark and that creative spark can be cultivated through artistic pursuits. Capitalist realism pushes people to only accept a selected class of artisans as artists (who all ideologically reproduce capitalist ideology of course) while the rest of us proles form the unwashed hoi polloi masses who know nothing but rolling around in our own filth consooming various forms of slop. By attempting to snuff out the creative spark that resides within all of us, it also divorces us from our own subjectivity, which among other things dreams of a better world or at least a world that’s less shitty as this neoliberal hellworld.
Trying to be a better or more “sophisticated” consoomer is a distraction from what should be the goal of rediscovering and cultivating that creative spark. The deception is thinking consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is somehow completely different from consooming the entire work of Goethe in the original German. Consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is perfectly fine if it leads to something like doing Sonic cosplay or drawing Sonic fanart or creating Sonic ytp or even writing your own shitty Sonic fanfic because those are all acts of creation, expressions of that creative spark, unsophisticated as they may be. While few 13 year olds aren’t going to create anything of value, if that 13 year old doesn’t give up and continues to hone their craft, they can go on to create great things in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on.
Cultivating the creative spark through creative works prepares us for the most important creation of all: the creation of a better world.
The person you’re replying to said they were in their mid 30s in the comment you replied to, so perhaps he hwa beareþ þe Aqua Teen Hunger Force profile Picture sholde not be þrowynge Stanes in his owne glass Hus when it comes to media literacy. I see you walked back your “adult baby” comment with that edit, too.
oh, fuck off
idk how old you are, but any millennial who thinks TADC is super deep and complex is an adult baby. Tell me I’m wrong.
My comment proved too challenging for you to read, apparently. Fuck all the way off, lib
truly this is the most challenging of online media.
I edited my comment to be less mean but I’ve decided to stop. You are in your 30s, you should be consuming more challenging media than TADC. That shit about cartesian dualism or whatever is fucking cope about a plotline that’s one step removed from Sword Art Online. You are what people are talking about when they complain about emotionally stunted adult children.
Personally, I would dismiss anyone complaining about “emotionally stunted adult children” out of hand as a form of reactionary nonsense. “Arrested development”, by which I mean people being stuck in life situations seemingly broadly unchanged since high school, and left unable to attain any of the typical markers of adulthood, is an issue that impacts countless people; but it is a systemic issue of our mode of production literally pricing people out of adulthood. This issue won’t get solved by yelling at strangers over the Internet for watching cartoons — doing so is counterproductive in fact! The cartoons, as a matter of fact, are a complete “goddam” non-issue, unless you’re already fully programmed into some depressing idea of “adulthood” meaning that one must become a drone of capital that decries any form of whimsy or creativity, because you need to appear Sophisticated™ and Mature™ at all times. Are we really going to return to the brony struggle session of 2023?
There’s a difference between “everything must be serious at all times” and “people need to nurture the ability to be serious”. My contention is that a specific internet show has really obvious, on the nose writing, and that if that’s still your benchmark for good writing by the time you hit your thirties then you have failed as a critical consumer of media.
I said that I like a show, and then provided some context for why other people around my age find it appealing. Then you barged in to tell me I’m immature because you don’t find the character development or writing (aspects I didn’t even mention) is up to your Mature Adult standards.
that’s not even something I’d disagree with. It’s a high-concept cartoon, not a novel.
I didn’t say that I hold the show up as a benchmark for good writing. You are hallucinating more than chatgpt
lmao. You take consooming very seriously
That only happened in your head. I did not call you immature until you started swearing at me unprovoked.
You went at them for talking about a cartoon on the assumption that cartoons are the only media they consume. That’s pretty fucking provocative. Also rude and uncalled for.
I have taken a few hours to do some fun things and hopefully calm myself down a bit, lest I get unnecessarily fired up about a cartoon I haven’t even seen more than a few minutes of and didn’t particularly like from that limited experience. What I’ll say is that there is a valid point that you’re trying to make, which is that people shouldn’t be reading only YA until they’re 35. I would agree that people need to challenge themselves and “nurture the ability to be serious.” But your actually valid point here is just getting completely muddied by this whole condescending superiority complex you have, the brainworms around age making you unnecessarily hostile, and also that you assume what other people mean instead of letting them explain themselves. I did actually click like on your first comment: I thought you were being very unnecessarily condescending, and the person you were replying to was in their right to tell you to fuck off for that, but if you’d just left your comment at you finding the writing in TADC to be too on the nose with the characters always spelling out their feelings, then that would’ve been a perfectly valid critique of the work. I mean, I’ve heard people say that Moby Dick is on the nose with its symbolism, and it is! All the symbolism in that book is spelled out for you, yet it’s still considered a classic and I’ve enjoyed it. I also find House, MD to have very on the nose writing with the characters’ emotions being constantly spelled out for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like House, it just means that that aspect of it does irritate me a bit. And I thought at first that when you said “baby’s first”, you were referring to the writers, not the viewers — because the writing in TADC is going to suffer a bit from the fact that it’s an independent production, right? My understanding is that projects like TADC are made at least partially to build portfolios for the people who work on them, so the most masterful episodic writing won’t be found in independent animation of any kind, writers in independent animation are still finding their footing and honing their skills. But no, you were referring to the viewers as babies!
All that Doubtingtammy said was “the overall plot explores cartesian skepticism/dualism, much like the Matrix (and I Have No Mouth…)” — which is a very different claim from saying that TADC is a “benchmark for good writing”: that claim is entirely your own invention pulled from thin air. Doubtingtammy didn’t even assert that they thought that TADC explored those themes well or even intentionally, just that they thought that the themes were there, and likely inspired by those previous works, and a reason why they found it surprising that young people liked the show. We can maybe infer that Doubtingtammy thought that those themes were explored “well” in TADC, but “well” in what sense? “Well” for a work of contemporary independent animation, or “well” for any work of fiction in any genre or medium, ever? Doubtingtammy didn’t specify, but I would’ve assumed the former, and I guess you must’ve assumed the latter and just run with your interpretation. The least you could’ve done is asked why Doubtingtammy had that reading of the work instead of jumping right to calling them an emotionally stunted adult baby. Isn’t critical consumption of media all about backing up your analysis using the text?!
In conclusion, I want to say that there doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between enjoying “mature” and “immature” things. I’m assuming that Doubtingtammy has read a lot more books and seen a lot more shows and movies than just the ones mentioned in their first comment, and many of those unmentioned works probably are things you’d consider much more well-written than TADC. People should learn to read more than just YA, but that doesn’t mean losing the ability to enjoy YA! YA doesn’t have to become boring just because there are other things you can read, you just need to be able to appreciate YA for what it is. You know? Like, I like Ante (1975) for what it is — a groundbreaking representation of Sámi issues in the popular culture of Norway — but that doesn’t mean I think a 70s live action kids’ show is the best thing since sliced bread, it really isn’t.
It’s just a good thing that some people are able to like things that other people can’t.
Revisiting this after reading through a few hours ago. Really good points made here.
As a tangent it feels like this debate over YA versus “mature” art echoes the Socialist Realism era in which art was intentionally pushed to be relatable and intelligible to the average working person. This was in response to centuries of high-brow and inaccessible art being the only admissible art, an emblem of class barriers and the intentional obfuscation and gatekeeping. The thought was, no, art doesn’t have to be inscrutable and “nuanced”, it can and maybe should be direct. I would love for an actual art historian to add more to this since it’s just my basic understanding.
Quite beside these points about realism, I think there are other reasons that adults today might reach for (apparently) children’s media that has less to do with an adult’s individual arrested development, and more to do with their daily alienation and social invalidation of their emotions and struggle within capitalism. Kids shows usually do a lot of emotional validation which makes them alluring for alienated adults also.
Don’t want to dox my age, but I am very much an adult and I’ve recently got into One Piece and Pokémon, so these ideas have been on my mind anyway. I feel happier since starting these shows, so I don’t care if they’re not adult shows
The thing about alienation driving people to kids’ media has been on my mind too lately, as a long-term fan of kids’ cartoons who recently read The Catcher in the Rye. — I mean, becoming an adult means being thrown into this whole alienating machine that is being a worker under capitalism, right? And this fact practically gives working class adults a pathological fixation on the people who haven’t yet been thrown into the capitalist machine, namely children, and by extent children’s things. The form this fixation takes varies between adults based on their individual circumstance and disposition, like some people might proudly be fans of children’s media, some people might bitterly despise children out of envy, whatever it may be; but the fixation is always there and cut from the same cloth in any case, because being an adult necessarily means existing in relationship to children as an individual actor in the social institution of age, no different from how men are pathologically fixated on women, cis people on trans people, the unracialized on the racialized, et cetera.
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around―nobody big, I mean―except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff―I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.” —Holden Caulfield
My perspective of art these days is that everyone, by virtue of being a human with an inner world, has a creative spark and that creative spark can be cultivated through artistic pursuits. Capitalist realism pushes people to only accept a selected class of artisans as artists (who all ideologically reproduce capitalist ideology of course) while the rest of us proles form the unwashed hoi polloi masses who know nothing but rolling around in our own filth consooming various forms of slop. By attempting to snuff out the creative spark that resides within all of us, it also divorces us from our own subjectivity, which among other things dreams of a better world or at least a world that’s less shitty as this neoliberal hellworld.
Trying to be a better or more “sophisticated” consoomer is a distraction from what should be the goal of rediscovering and cultivating that creative spark. The deception is thinking consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is somehow completely different from consooming the entire work of Goethe in the original German. Consooming shitty Sonic fanfic is perfectly fine if it leads to something like doing Sonic cosplay or drawing Sonic fanart or creating Sonic ytp or even writing your own shitty Sonic fanfic because those are all acts of creation, expressions of that creative spark, unsophisticated as they may be. While few 13 year olds aren’t going to create anything of value, if that 13 year old doesn’t give up and continues to hone their craft, they can go on to create great things in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on.
Cultivating the creative spark through creative works prepares us for the most important creation of all: the creation of a better world.
Fair criticism. But I maintain that if someone comes at me with an unprovoked “fuck off” I am entitled to respond to it.
It was a provoked “fuck off”
As I like to put it:
First you’re not too old for Pokemon.
Then you get too old for Pokemon.
Then you stop being too old for Pokemon.
Okay: you’re wrong.
To elaborate: 30 years ago, people like you were saying that you can get too old for anime or video games.
It’s fine to enjoy things, but if you only ever read YA novels then you won’t be maturing as a reader.
The person you’re replying to said they were in their mid 30s in the comment you replied to, so perhaps he hwa beareþ þe Aqua Teen Hunger Force profile Picture sholde not be þrowynge Stanes in his owne glass Hus when it comes to media literacy. I see you walked back your “adult baby” comment with that edit, too.
Like Aqua Teen Hunger Force?