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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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You can do this type of reductionist deconstruction with every story.

As a counter argument: Using the 'correct' view, good stories are about the journey. Not the Shyamalanaman plot twist, clever subversion of tropes or badass value shifts.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by these short term moments, designed to give you an emotional high, and lose focus on what's actually good when you're born into what's effectively a vortex dragging your brain towards this sort of short term stimuli on an ever-accelerating repeat. But we should be able to spot it.

This vortex afflicts both the consumer and creator. As can be seen, for example with projects like Star Trek. One of the big problems with new Star Trek, to kick that dead horse, is the narrow scope of the overarching narrative. It's not about a transcendent view of humanity, that existed in the older versions. It's about... Brexit? Immigration? Racism? It loses sight of what makes the 'journey' of watching Star Trek and being immersed in that universe feel good. None of the bells and whistles of the new era matter since the journey you have to take to enjoy them involves wrapping yourself in some sort of post-progressive pessimism where humanity is still constantly tripping over itself.

By the same token, categorizing fairy tales by their plot elements is just... For a lack of a better term: Not getting it.

You don't really need a plot twist at the end of a story with a simple moral message. And whilst the OG versions of these fairy tales often had a quite a... 'convoluted' message, they lived on to serve a different purpose. In short: These movies should be wrapping the viewer in the warm embrace of a loved one that's just sat down next to them on a sofa with a grandfather clock rhythmically ticking in the background. Ready to soothingly tell them a story from memory. Instead the movie is contextualized in political feces before it's even released.