Talk to enough Millennials and Zoomers, and before long the conversation will turn to their favorite pop culture brands. Discussing these brands with them at any length will give you the strong impression that younger generations have a deep affinity for projecting themselves into these properties.
Without a doubt, you’ll find members of every generation who indulge in self-insert fantasizing about their favorite franchises. What’s striking about Millennials and Zoomers is that huge numbers of them–perhaps a majority–cannot engage with stories by any other means than self-projection into the narrative.
This phenomenon has become so widespread that many readers may not know that other modes of consuming fiction exist. The reason is as simple as it is unsettling. Drawing audiences in to vicariously live the emotional ups and downs of a story as if experiencing them firsthand is the main mechanism of propaganda. The skilled propagandist creates a hero who serves as an empty vessel into which the audience pours their hopes, fears, and desires. They do not merely identify with the character, they impose their identity on a character-shaped blank slate. When the cardboard cutout wins according the morality the propagandist wants to push, the audience gets a dopamine hit.
Younger audiences’ diminished ability to relate to any other kind of character is a testament to how saturated with propaganda pop culture has become. In fact, it’s been that way for decades. Harry Potter has no discernible personality. He can only be described by his circumstances. Similarly, the main characters from the Star Wars prequels are famously impossible to describe without referring to their jobs or appearance. Fans of the former billion-dollar IP notoriously personalize their attachment to the brand. It should be noted that fans of the latter, even among the counterculture, display a similar penchant for self-insertion. That’s leaving aside Disney’s conscious decision to make the lead role in their Star Wars sequels an utter nonentity. Megacorps have trapped the average Millennial in a fantasy world of cardboard.
It wasn’t always like this. The myths, legends, and epic poems that once formed the bedrock of civilization served to teach younger generations their place in the tribe and the world. The great stories explained a people to themselves and illustrated their duties to throne, altar, and family.
We are descendants of the last survivors of Troy. It is our sacred charge to keep the flame of our ancestors’ traditions alight.
Never mind the Iliad and the Aeneid. Introduce younger readers to the golden age pulps that inspired the mega-brands, and you’ll frequently hear complaints of the characters being too simple, too one-dimensional, not nuanced enough.
A cursory review of the material reveals those complaints as 180 degree inversions of the truth. Solomon Kane contains multitudes, whereas the prequels’ Anakin Skywalker’s entire personality is pouting. The Shadow embodies layers of complexity, a looming air of menace, and a mysterious past to shame Wolverine.
The reason for Millennial audiences’ aversion to heroes of yesteryear is the exact opposite of what they claim. It’s not that classic pulp and pulp-inspired characters are too simple to relate to; it’s that they’re too richly drawn and robust for audiences to refashion as self-inserts.
That’s not to argue that listeners of the Shadow radio show couldn’t imagine themselves donning a slouch hat and ruthlessly pursuing justice with a pair of blazing automatics. What can’t be done is twisting the Shadow away from his definition of justice to serve the audience’s subjective preferences. Not without destroying the character. The recent high-profile attempt to do just that spectacularly crashed and burned.
The moral dimension can’t be overlooked. Vast swaths of contemporary audiences can’t identify with a character who’s out to uphold the good because an objective, universal concept of the good is entirely alien to them.
This is why the cookie cutter blank slate protagonist has become such a fixture of current storytelling. The more fractured and atomized society becomes, the fewer common understandings audiences share. It’s a vicious circle, since earlier propaganda destroyed those shared understandings in the first place.
Beware of critics complaining that golden age characters or their spiritual heirs lack complexity, depth, and nuance. Nine times out of ten, said critic has a long history of attending writers’ workshops taught by oldpub oxygen thieves and zero commercially published works.
But not even the Pop Cult can truly change human nature. For every Millennial irretrievably lost to the swamp of witchery, mystery boxes, and capeshit, another finds a copy of Tarzan of the Apes and finds his way into a larger world.
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Harry Potter has no discernible personality. He can only be described by his circumstances.
At the risk of stepping into a hornet’s nest, this is definitely untrue. Harry has a hero complex that is so strong it becomes a fault, and is unfailingly loyal, as well as distrustful of authority unless he is given a reason to trust it. His first reaction to issues tends to be instinctual and emotional rather than logical or rational. Harry has a strong sense of justice but is easily fooled into a sort of tunnel vision of the solution he considers the best, like his analysis of Snape, Malfoy, his view of the Deathly Hallows, and his reaction to Sirius’s kidnapping.
Rowling has her issues but character writing, mostly, isn’t one of them.
That explains why most of what we are getting these days looks like really bad fan fiction. We are being Mary Sued (or is it Reyed?) into mediocrity. These kids have no idea what they are missing.
Those character traits don’t come to the fore until book 5 or 6; book 3 at the earliest.
In book 1, which any author will tell you is the one that hooks readers, Harry is just a shyer gender-swapped Cinderella. He doesn’t start developing virtues worth emulating until after the second book.
Even then, they’re all soft virtues lacking an intrinsic moral dimension. Even Commodus had ambition. Even the wicked know to act for their in-group’s benefit.
The rainbow-haired HP fanatics find him an easy vehicle for their values for a reason.
I have to agree. Harry Potter has a very clear personality, as do all of the other characters in the books. He’s nothing like, say, Ray… who, in the first of the last trilogy film, had at least some personality and a nice small relationship with Finn, who had even more of a personality. The complete lack of both their relationship AND their personalities were part of the very bizarre entity that was film number two (I don’t even bother with their names). Harry’s longing for a family, in particular for the parents he never knew, is very affecting. Ray doesn’t long for her family, she’s just a “young female of indeterminate age who is waiting for her long-lost parents to come back and then kind of forgets about it” — a list of attributes, not a character.
This is probably part of why ‘representation’ is considered So Very Important to Pop Cultists. Lurking in enemy territory, I saw someone post that he had “known very sharp and literate women who admitted they never got into [The Hobbit] because Tolkien provided literally zero people for them to identify with.”
I remember much the same thing when Black Panther came out and Blade was pushed into the memory hole. Back when Blade came out people were able to understand hero stories just fine. Within less than 20 years the audience, and creators, lost all capacity to do that. They do not appear interested in getting it back.
This is what makes new spaces like NewPub such a great thing. I couldn’t even imagine something like this a decade ago, but now we have all sorts of options. We just need to reach more people and show them what they’re missing out on.
I think the other reason may be that they have lost the ability to empathize creatively. Such a demand for ‘representation’ means, “I must see someone just like me, or I’ve been ‘erased’.” It is as if they don’t understand fiction, and can’t comprehend not being the center of attention, even in a secondary world that looks nothing like ours. The irony of all that is that it demands paint-by-numbers demographic tokens, turning people into stock characters with less depth than the templates that made commedia dell’arte what it was.
RE: “Representation.” I remember looking for books about girls and young women when I was a child. I didn’t pick a book about boys unless I couldn’t find one about girls. But learning that a book about a boy could ALSO be a book I enjoyed was an important lesson. I got double the books that way! Same with books about people from other countries, and other cultures. They all added MORE. The whole idea that “people can only identify with those who look like them” is a dangerous one.
John Carter of Mars? More like… “Non-Starter” of Mars!
Come on, Brian! True protagonists don’t smash space princesses. They smash the patriarchy!
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Most pulp heroes are aspirational, as in people you would like to be or want to follow them on their journey. They aren’t like you but you admire their quest and what they do. Almost no one understands this type of hero anymore. At best they end up crafting a Mary Sue, which is an inversion of this type of hero. It’s what people believe pulp heroes were, but actually aren’t and they would know that if they read them.
For instance, the first Doc Savage novel I read started with him nearly being gunned down and having to hide from his assailant before spending the rest of the story trying to discern his attacker’s identity and what their goal was. Aspirational heroes aren’t omnipotent, they’re just really good at what they do. They represent the best of us, but they’re still human.
Modern heroes just exist to fill tropes and clichés that audiences can slide themselves in at no cost to themselves. Since we no longer have a cohesive culture in the west, they are all muted and broad to a comical degree. You essentially can’t give them a personality because your common bugman is incapable of “relating” to anything that isn’t broken or debased. Give them a story with a hero that isn’t a degenerate loser of a Mary Sue and they won’t know how to react to it.
However, judging from how the box office was already cratering before Corona, and how OldPub is well beyond their expiration date, it is clear to see that the majority find themselves repelled by this stories. These industries are dying because they don’t understand human nature at all. Eventually, truth wins out.
You nailed the difference between aspirational pulp heroes and Mary Sue postmodern protagonists. Look up the stats on narcissism by generation. Most Millennials want characters that are reverse funhouse mirrors. Showing them a character who’s quantifiably better than them in some respect inflicts them with five-alarm cogdis.
Threading the needle between realism and the black pill is difficult. Hollywood, Oldpub, and old style television are on the ropes. On the other hand, time has disproven “Get woke, go broke.”
Streaming services have picked up the slack for Hollywood and TV. The situation is far from hopeless, but we have to accept that there’s no sleeping majority ready to wake up and rout the Death Cult if we just whisper the right word in their ear. Nick Jr. never would’ve gotten away with the Blues Clues atrocity if most people a) disagreed with it and b) were motivated to object.
Somehow we seem to be going the other way in video games. Classic video games tended to let you make your own characters (ex. crpgs) or had characters that intentionally had next to no characterization (ex. protagonists in IF or Myst style adventure games, as well as most retro fps protagonists). The reason for this was obvious: since the player literally controls the character, having that character be an extension of the player’s personality was natural.
But now there is a push to have well defined player characters. There are plenty of people who will claim that Super Metroid is flawed in comparison to Other M because we don’t know what Samus is feeling (even people who dislike the gameplay and story of Other M will usually praise it for trying to put Samus more front and center). Similarly FPS protagonists always have some sort of character arc now, RPGs that theoretically let you make your own characters will still force a backstory onto you, etc.
I think the reason for this goes hand in hand as to why games are less based on skill and more based on leveling and items. When you beat a game like Doom it’s you who is beating it. There is no aid from allies, cutscenes or anything but your own skills. However if the player doesn’t have any confidence in himself such an environment will be overwhelming and intimidating. On the other hand if the game plays a cutscene where the main character does some cool things, the player can easily fantasize about himself doing the same things without needing to develop any skills of his own.
Really interesting points, and very much in the vein of what I’ve been realizing over the last few years.
As an author, I have been completely bombarded by the advice to ‘show, don’t tell’, and the close third-person (which is basically first person, but not told by the character themselves) is hyped as being the best way to write because you can really get into the character and feel what they’re feeling.
I tried to write that way for ages, but I finally realized that I didn’t like it and never really had. It’s TOO close. It forces the author to try to *become* the character and spend the entire book practically navel-gazing. I also realized that every book that was written in that way was narrow and shallow despite the supposed ‘depth’ that it was supposed to have.
But getting out of that mindset is really hard after literally over a decade of brainwashing.
What I grew up reading, and have always loved deeply, was Tolkien. Now his characters were *deep*, even though he used third person omniscient. I felt for the characters in a way that I’ve never felt for characters in a modern book. Yet I was never really tempted to insert myself into that world. It was Middle Earth, and I was me, reading about Middle Earth. The characters fulfilled a longing to read about heroes and goodness and self-sacrifice.
The same with Narnia. Although I don’t think Lewis’ characters are as deep as Tolkien’s, and although as a child I did play a lot of Narnia stories with my siblings, it was the books themselves that captured my imagination. Narnia transcended self-insertion for me once I’d gotten into my early teens.
I feel like it grounded me in the love of heroism and the ideal of courage. The Last Battle is probably my favorite book of the seven, and Tirian is my favorite character because he stood firm in the darkest hour.
These are not trivial ideals, and because they have been almost entirely replaced by antiheroes, moral relativism, and a rejection of objective goodness, they are extremely important to absorb.
Another commenter was talking about ‘representation’, and this has always been a really weird idea to me.
There are universal human emotions and values that transcend individuals: love, honor, piety, valor, and a hundred others.
The result of ‘representation’ has been to cut apart human experience into tiny slices. “This slice is for you, and this slice is for me, and neither of us can ever relate to each other because we are much too different.”
I think this is why it surprises us nowadays that we can read, say, the Psalms, written by a 10th century BC Hebrew king (something that none of us can relate to in an experiential way, and removed by a distance of three thousand years) and yet the emotions are so familiar and so real that we can immediately understand them and our hearts can use the same exact words in prayer.
Our world has become narrow and stunted, and has lost its grip on the reality of thousands of years of human history (both good and bad). We are now living in a time that has no regard for anything but itself, the shallow moment-by-moment that ends immediately and is entirely self-focussed.