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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   2940 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 6, 2022

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Do you guys think that a preference for children's media over media targeted toward adults is a sign of emotional immaturity or psychological issues?

I'm in my late 20's and I still primarily consume media made for children, but I'm not likely to enjoy it unless the protagonists are adults or the situations are allegorical enough that I can relate to them regardless of the characters' canon ages.

I find children's media is often easier to enjoy, they're simple fun. But the best works, the ones that make me feel or think very deeply, are media targeted at adults. So I might consume 90% content for children, 10% for adults, but that 10% for adults are disproportionately my favourites.

Could you name some of your favorite things from that 10%?

Recently, Andor on Disney+ has been very good, it's a political thriller in the Star Wars universe about a petty criminal getting pulled into the Rebellion. Lots of "Good people doing the wrong things for the right reasons" which is a theme I love.

The Game of Thrones books are another favourite of mine.

Bojack Horseman is probably my favourite show, it's both hilarious and emotional, and consistently good through all 6 seasons.

Elizier Yudowsky's, Scott Alexander's, and qntm's short stories all often make me take a moment to think after reading them.

I'm in my late 20's and I still primarily consume media made for children, but I'm not likely to enjoy it unless the protagonists are adults or the situations are allegorical enough that I can relate to them regardless of the characters' canon ages.

Have you considered that you're not enjoying it because it's not relatable to you?

Oh, absolutely. That's what I explained in my long-form post. But I still generally go for media that's made for younger audiences.

If you’re watching it to relax and unwind, then it’s good. If you’re watching it to inform your worldview, or to regress, or to avoid responsibilities, it’s bad.

I am letting it inform my worldview. I think A Series of Unfortunate Events has good insight insight into human nature, as do a number of Pixar movies. But Breaking Bad does too, and I know that's for adults.

Whenever I consume media, I come to be entertained first and foremost, but I only fall in love with it if it says something.

Bingo.

I enjoy a lot of 'juvenile' comedy at times. I don't repeat the jokes in polite company, I don't pretend they're particularly insightful.

No. Adult or Grown Up has become increasingly code for "Grimdark" or "violent, profane, and depressing." Depth is equated with cynicism and obscenity. If those are your options, might as well stick with the kids stuff.

C.S. Lewis:

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

When I was 12, I'd watch a boring foreign film about Mexican politics and the homoeroticism underlying Latino machismo and not understand 90% of the message, because I'd heard there were tits somewhere in it and I could get the DVD. At 30, telling me a movie has tits in it does not make me want to watch it, I'm indifferent to it. I'm neither offended by a film using nudity and sex to useful effect to talk about the human psyche; nor impressed by a story that throws in an obligatory shot of tits to irrelevant scenes.

Strip out the adolescent delight that self-consciously "adult" fans take in over-the-top violence or obscenity, and a lot of the Adult-Targeted media is trash, with themes less interesting and philosophy shallower than the "kids stuff."

No, I do not. But I have extremely relevant issues, so that doesn't answer the question...

But I have to ask: whence the concept of children's fiction? Or, even, whence the concept of adult's fiction? Or better yet, how functional is the post-industrial idea of child Vs adult, compared to pre-industrial versions of these identities/roles?

Childhood and adulthood as we know them today are new. Yes, the two have been distinguished since time immemorial, but not in precisely this way. Decreased child mortality, child labor laws, compulsory education, the disappearance of jobs that children could traditionally participate in, all utterly transformed what it means, culturally, to be child/adult. "Culturally" being the key word.

Entertainment, though, has such a whacky history that I'm sure I'd miss something trying to summarize it. I think the big thing is that, at some point, the entertainment and toy industries realized how much of a cash-cow specifically targeting children can be, followed by realizing that getting an older audience to stick with it will also increase profits. Furthermore, if we're talking the past 40-50 years? Children's entertainment is wildly different from the nursery rhymes and fairytales of a century ago. At this point, I think culture hasn't really caught up with the fact that the entertainment industry is trying to get really good at selling fun stuff, and that they sometimes succeed beyond what a narrow view of demographics would suggest. Kids growing up with media made for children, these days, are growing up with the products that out-competed weaker products. Of course it's going to have sticking power.

More than all that, though, when entertainment became a mass industry, constantly pumping out new material, I think that left a huge impact on culture we haven't really figured out, yet. When producing new stories in masse was expensive, popular culture didn't have much to latch onto. Pop culture as a concept is spectacularly different following a relevant technological innovation, after all. References to the Bible and classical mythology were the norm, and it was all public domain so you didn't have to worry about getting demonitized for quoting a Psalm or two. Put a clip from Harry Potter in a video on Youtube, and so help you if it's more than five seconds long.

TLDR: this aspect of culture is changing, and fast, and has been for a good century and then some, at least. What do concepts like childish and immature actually mean, and how long have they meant that, and why? What even is the purpose of entertainment? I don't think the answers to any of these are sufficiently agreed upon for there to be a straightforward answer to the original question.

I still primarily consume media made for children, but I'm not likely to enjoy it

Why do you do it, and why don’t you enjoy it?

Until my late teens, I avoided live-action material entirely because I had trouble reading body language. The sitcoms that aired on children's networks were sufficiently over the top in direction that I could understand them, but they were also all terrible (except for Drake and Josh).

As I've aged, I've gotten better at reading body language, but I still have trouble making certain types of inferences. I did not pick up on the sexual tension between John Travolta's character and boss's wife in Pulp Fiction until he said outright that he needs to last until he can masturbate, and I was like "Where did that come from?" Apparently that was supposed to be obvious when they were dancing, but I was just bored by what appeared to be nothing happening.

My two favorite entertainment mediums are animation and musical theater. Most English-language animation is either made for kids or so stiff that it may as well not be animated at all. Musical theater is theoretically for all ages, but literal theater kids are the functional tastemakers. (Hamilton is about adults, but Dear Evan Hansen is about kids and Beetlejuice is Hot Topic kitsch.)

I got into the MCU when I was 17, and I do still enjoy some of it, but Endgame was a letdown for me, in large part because the characters rewrote the rules of reality to get out of the consequences of their actions, something they can now theoretically do at any point in the future. They could go back, get the stones, use them to revive Tony, and then return them. The only person they can't bring back is Black Widow. I mean.. people would say that these movies were made for kids because of all the toys, but I denied that because they were PG-13 and had references to sex and drugs. Now I understand why that doesn't prove anything.

Also, a post from a dead blogging site was recently sent my way, and while I don't agree with or even understand all of it, some passages hit close to home for me. (Ctrl+f "Deadpool.")

https://www.tumblr.com/hotelconcierge/167221016499/young-adult-fictions

As for why I don't like media about kids doing kid things, there are two reasons. The first is that it makes me feel old, because I'm not a child anymore. The second is that I might be reminded about things I missed out on as a kid and will never get to experience.

I'm currently fixated on A Series of Unfortunate Events. The storyline does play off how kids have no real control of their lives, but beyond that, it's allegorical and people of any age could have comparable experiences. Evangelion is also one of my favorite works of fiction, and I relate to Shinji more than any other fictional character. Watching Gravity Falls has gotten harder for me, though, because I'm farther away from the ages of Dipper and Mabel than I was when it came out, and watching Ed, Edd, 'n' Eddy has become outright depressing, even though I love the slapstick. When I was a kid who never went outside and had no friends, I saw that show as aspirational, about something I wanted to have. Now it's about something I never had and never will. Even if I develop a completely functional social life, I'll never build a cardboard city that everyone in the neighborhood shows up to, our imaginations getting carried away as though it's real.

I kind of regret going all therapy mode here. I do have an actual therapist and could be talking about this with him. But this is CW-adjacent, right? It's about something that a lot of terminally online people relate to, so hopefully you guys can get something out of what I'm writing here.

(Final tangent: I never got around to reading Harry Potter as a kid because I didn't like reading, and I want to read it now, but I'm worried it'll remind me that I missed out on whatever cool high school stuff Harry does. Does he go to a wizard prom? Does he experience teenage wizard love?)

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