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I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.
I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.
Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.
Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.
Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.
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