I should probably elaborate more but I’m sleepy
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
- C. S. Lewis
performative quoting is still cool right?
… indeed …
- Karl Marx
In turn, CS Lewis is quoting a well-known passage from the Epistle to the Romans, to put a twist on it and say almost the opposite of what Paul was saying.
The only people i know who did performative maturity were actually teenagers or young adults thinking being an adult wasnt about emotional maturity, conflict handling, emotional resilience and freely enjoying your life without worrying about judgement but instead about presenting like an adult through consumption choices.
To me a alot of adults i actually consider adults are immature little goblins who like ridiculous toys but when you need someone to depend on for something serious there’s no one better.
deleted by creator
You can’t fool me, this is about the recent TADC discourse
Was there a thread I missed ? I had fun with the Amazing Digital Circus. I think its cute and I liek cute things.
The show was fun. The fandom is kind of insufferable (present company excluded of course)
People seem to be very mad at me for saying that the show is a treat and has simple writing (although I did like it).
Actually, I think it had more to do with your condescension
lmao every time, “i’m just an uwu smol bean” meanwhile bro was a hair away from calling people the r-slur
If you come at me with aggression I will get mad. If you disagree with my premise that people shouldn’t cocoon themselves permanently in media for children I’m going to call you a clown.
cocoon themselves permanently in media for children
It’s never been for children, the author has said as much and has warned people not to let their kids watch it and watching a couple of colorful shows isn’t cacooning yourself in children’s media lmao what the hell are we even doing right now?
The whole “animation is for kids only” is a thing popularised by Disney, it’s marketing vibes and US culture brainworms.
Half the “this is totally for kids trust me bro” media I’m drawn to is because I find half the gritty serious media out there shallow and vapid. I like indie media that doesn’t have a strict genre or demographic because it’s not trying too hard to be anything other than the authors project. I have to wonder what this totally challenging mature adults only media you’re consuming is, because the vast majority of adult fiction coming out isn’t Disco Elysium levels of deep, as much as I would like it to be. I do like a wide variety of media, but if you look past the aesthetics of most things you’ll realise that 99% of media for adults is just as unchallenging as most media for young adults and teens.
To me true maturity is the ability to not let vibes and social norms dictate and gatekeep you from appreciating something that is good on its own merit. I’m not even a big TADC fan (the ending was pretty clunky), but I appreate the technical skill involved in the animation with a small team, the humor is well timed, and the themes of not dehumanising people coping with mental and queer stuff, while not that nuanced, is still better representation than the vast majority of media out there. To say there is nothing for an adult to get from the show created by a 31 year old for other adults just because it’s animated and has a lot of young fans is just plain silly and in my opinion, ironically childish.
This is literally just a lie. You were insulting people immediately in, as many people have said, a backhanded fashion. “It reads as deep if you’re a manchild” is, in terms of pragmatics, not just a criticism of the show.
Edit: I will add, also as many others did, that I don’t like the show, it’s way too skibidi for me, but if other people do and find it meaningful then that’s good.
My first comment did not do that. People got mad at me for an entirely neutral read of the simplicity of the show’s writing and why I thought that lended it appeal to younger people. The insults came later.
Unfortunately for some reason I can’t get the comments on that thread to display and the modlog isn’t ordered by when the item was posted (it’s ordered by when the mod action happened). Help me remember here, was this your first comment?
From what I’ve seen it’s a pretty decent character driven show - but it’s also very much “baby’s first character driven story”. A lot of scenes involve the characters spelling out their feelings in no uncertain terms which, if your media taste is still at that level, reads as really deep and interesting, compared to something that’s more subtle about it which might just read as uninteresting to someone who isn’t following what’s happening.
That’s it. Reposting another comment where I responded to someone’s specific problem with my first one:
I disagree that “if your media taste is still at that level” is an attack on anyone. It’s a purely descriptive statement - kids who haven’t watched a lot of things operate on a more surface level, simple as. People who are older should be broadening their horizons to more complex fare, simple as. I agree that I let myself get mad and that was a mistake, but people got unreasonably mad at me for the first comment, not the third.
This is probably my last response on this topic, we’re at over 24 hours since the first comment now.
I will again invoke pragmatics, in that “if” in common language often reads as “only if,” or something very close to it, especially if there’s no context to encourage the other reading. I know that as a logical operator that’s not what it means, but you should be aware from your own experience that people frequently don’t use it as that logical operator.
Example: If you come to me with an idea and I say “That sounds like a good idea if you’re a complete idiot,” if we treat “if” as being the traditional operator, then this is not an insult because it could be that it sounds like a good idea to anyone, or a wide range of people, and complete idiots are just a specific demographic that I’ve arbitrarily chosen to name. However, pragmatically what I mean by this statement is closer to “That sounds like a good idea only if you’re a complete idiot,” which is obviously an insult.
So considered the reading “[this media] reads as really deep and interesting only if your media taste is still at that level”. Can you see why people might not take well to that? And how much can we begrudge them when there are about a hundred ways to phrase the more charitable reading of your statement that don’t have this point of pragmatic “ambiguity”? e.g. merely saying that “it’s a very accessible work artistically and that helped its popularity with a younger audience?”
Most things are treats. Hatsune Miku and Hello Kitty are treats and I like them
and I guess TADC Is kinda simple but that doesnt bother me
Thing you like ➡️ treat
Thing I like ➡️ art
We are not the same
Their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff!
I’m sorry the mods did this to you. I should have spent my free time on more anti-mod schemes. Now you got MDKed (Moderator death-killed) and I’m left on this site, alone, with people who are touchy as fuck over My Little Pony and TADC and The Last Avatar/Korra.
I will languish in your absence, and shrivel under the mods’ thumb.
Woah woah woah I will never defend Korra.
Getting touchy about someone thinking you like one children’s show over another is exactly what I said in my previous comment.
I was joking but alrighty fair point, I do get sensitive about weird things. Mostly when I feel misunderstood or stereotyped.
What is that show? I’ve been seeing talk about it and a whole lot of drama on the internet without any idea of what it means.
I’d literally never heard of the show before yesterday
It comes up on my fyp every now and then
Your Honor I reserve the right to be a vague posting shithead once a year
I’m sure this thread will be absolutely normal.I really don’t think this is about that pretentious boomer idiot.
Who?
It’s not in the thread anymore bc it got removed, but you can look it up in the mod log if you want to see a cis dude with takes like “real communists know how to drive stick” having bougie opinions on trans media on the trans comm.
Or i might as well call out @Carl@hexbear.net directly, let’s not fuck with this vagueposting shit. Carl, it’s already bad enough that you can’t appreciate an artist when she is up front in delivering what she has to say so the people have better odds of actually understanding her point. You look down on the artist who aims to communicate clearly and openly to the masses. This is, in itself, an act of cultural revisionism. But in this case, we’re also talking about trans issues, which constantly fly over the heads of cissies like you, and which we are almost never allowed to articulate ourselves, on our own terms on a platform as large as TADC.
Do you have any idea what it means when a trans woman who was mostly busy shitposting suddenly gets to tell a psychological cartoon horror story about a bunch of lesbians, two of which are canonically trans, that tops the box office on release day while it’s running against the latest Star Wars slop? No, you obviously don’t. So let me spell it out in words that are simple enough for a cis man to unpack: This show cannot afford to be subtle in its finale. Subtlety is not an option right now. When we get to communicate to an audience of 30 million cis people what being forced into repping does to us and those around us, while even the brunch libs are being mass-propagandized by the NYT into seeing our public existence as a problem that needs adressing, when our genocide is workshopped into being a bipartisan consensus, it is kinda obvious that clarity beats your latte sipping philistine idea of true art.
But that doesn’t matter to you. What matters to you is your toxic masculinity bullshit of lording it over everybody that you are more competent than them in every area, including the appreciation of gay 3D indie animation. Do some self crit, motherfucker.
This show cannot afford to be subtle in its finale. Subtlety is not an option right now.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately (though with other media. I haven’t seen the show being talked about). “I know writers who use subtext and those people are cowards,” was supposed to be ironic, but it’s becoming more and more true all the time. If you don’t explicitly state your beliefs, chuds will latch onto your art. Even when you’re upfront about it, they still might cling to it with all kinds of cope.
Examples from the last 5 years or so: Trench Crusade, The Boys, anything Star Wars or Star Trek, Don’t Look Up, Helldivers, Baulder’s Gate 3, and a bunch I’m forgetting off the top of my head. This doesn’t include things they get upset over that may even be reactionary, like Harry Potter.
You can shove leftism in their faces, and they’ll still deny it if they enjoy the art in question. If the author explicitly says outside of the work it’s meant to be leftwing/progressive/woke/whatever, chuds will bend over backwards trying to justify their participation.
Yowza.
You are putting entire political screeds into my mouth. All I said was that the writing is “baby’s first character drama”, because there are many scenes where the characters more or less look right into the camera and explain in no uncertain terms what their feelings are. I said that this probably explains its appeal to younger audience, who might be put off by more difficult-to-approach writing. I also said that I thought it was pretty good.
Nowhere in there did I look down on anyone except for the people coming at me with completely unwarranted anger, which you are now pulling into entirely unrelated threads.
You are putting entire political screeds into my mouth.
No, i am pointing out how your class position as a man and as a cis person blinds you to things that are obvious to me as a trans woman - for example, that characters sometimes outright stating their opinions is directly informed by the common trans experience of cis people explaining away things that are blatantly obvious to us.
If you would say “the mirror scene with Zooble was too on the nose as a metaphor for their dysphoria”, i wouldn’t disagree with that artistically, but i would argue that this is probably a secondary concern when there’s still several entire reddit threads trying to make sense of that scene while desperately trying to avoid any mention of gender dysphoria. The bluntness of TADC exists in the political climate of erasing our perspectives and denying our very existence. To a trans audience, this does not have to be pointed out because we have all been in a discussion where we’ve been dogpiled by cis men who think they can make a better call on trans issues than us. I’ve had such discussions even right here on hexbear.
When you think the directness of TADC is “childish” and not a defensive stance every trans woman is pressured into, you are entirely missing the point. When you do that in a thread on a trans comm, yes, people will get mad at you.
It’s so wild, it’s almost like art isn’t created in a vacuum and needs to be examined within the societal context in which it is made rather than just declaring one thing “good art” and another “bad art” based on personal notions of “maturity” which is also a very society specific idea as to what is and what isn’t “mature”.
you are an exceptionally annoying type of person.
The Adam Dickland Chow
performative elaborating is annoying af so
But have you considered that only the people who read mature and serious works and deprive themselves of anything fun or joyous in their lives are allowed to sit at the cool kids table? Otherwise you’ll have to go and sit with the uncool kids, who do silly things like, enjoy life.
I have tried to not be silly for long periods in the past and I’m pretty sure I am physically incapable after too long.
Like everyone here knows I can be serious when I want to, but if I’m like that all the time, it’s not me. Same if I’m silly 100% of the time I burn out on that too.
If I get too trapped in a rigid archetype my brain starts turning off and I go into autopilot and no one wants autopilot dort
The way I move and occupy physical space is too silly for me to pull off being serious. It’s a weird juxtaposition where my words and demeanor are super serious but my physicality is super goofy. I do not know how to replicate this online. Perhaps this is just the limitation of online social interactions.
With emotes like this
Yeah, I’ve been there, going through life on autopilot is no way to live. I hope you’ll always be able to be yourself
While i’m all for mocking the idea of maturity. It does kind of suck that the kinds of books that sell are porn and genre fiction (And within genre fiction mostly YA stuff)
Sure is nice getting to draw porn day in and day out because it’s the only way I can keep the lights on, and I no longer have the time or energy to work on the stuff I’d like to work on instead, because that stuff won’t sell. But I would honestly rather just make something fun and “immature” rather than trying to make the Darkest and Most Serious and Mature thing I could. Of course, if another artist wanted to make exclusively serious and mature stuff, they should absolutely be able to. The whole damn system just squeezes the actual unique creativity out of everyone, artist and the people consuming their art alike.I agree wholeheartedly.
there’s non-performative maturity?
i conserve my maturity for when it’s needed, the rest of the time i’m just kinda fucking around
