Talk to Millennials long enough, and they’ll turn the topic of conversation to their preferred pop culture brands. Discussing these corporate IPs with them for any length of time will give you the definite impression that this generation doesn’t just consume these entertainment products, they project themselves into them.
To anticipate the objection, members of every generation indulge self-insert fantasies about their pet franchises. What’s typical of Millennials is that vast numbers of them cannot engage with stories through any other avenue than self-projection into the plot.
This phenomenon has become so common that many younger adults may not know any other way to enjoy fiction.
How did this loss of objectivity happen?
The explanation is as simple as it is disturbing.
Manipulating audiences’ emotions to make them identify with a given narrative is how propaganda works. The best propagandists create heroes who serve as an empty vessels into which the audience pours their fears and aspirations.
They don’t just sympathize with these characters, they invest their identities in character-shaped holes.
When the humanoid void wins by acting on the morals pushed by the propagandists, the audience get a dopamine hit.
Younger generations’ undeveloped ability to relate to other kinds of characters testifies to how propaganda-saturated pop culture has become.
The protagonists from the Star Wars prequels may be notoriously hard to describe without referring to their jobs or looks. But their Mouse Wars successors are color-coded ciphers that exist only to “represent” various viewer demographics.
Fellow Disney IP farm Marvel Studios has now embraced anti-white, anti-male agitprop to disastrous results.
Yet the damage is done. Pop Cult megacorps have trapped the average Millennial in a hall of mirrors.
It wasn’t always like this. The legends, epics, and folk tales that once formed the foundation of civilization once taught younger generations their place in society. Myths once explained our people to themselves – until they were dismissed as myths.
Never mind Genesis, the Odyssey, and the Matter of Britain. Recommend the pulp novels strip mined by today’s zombie IPs, and brace for Millennials’ complaints about the characters being one-dimensional, unrelatable, and problematic.
But an honest look at the heroes of yesteryear compared to the tokens of Current Year reveals that attitude as projection.
John Carter, Doc Savage, and Tarzan are icons that have lasted a century. When Millennials attempt the self-projection approach they’ve been trained to approach all characters with, it’s like shining a smartphone at a million-candlepower searchlight.
Contemporary audiences can’t identify with characters who are out to pursue the good. Because to them, objective universal good is an alien idea. Because previous propaganda destroyed those concepts.
That’s why cardboard cutout protagonists have taken over storytelling. The more Balkanized and atomized society becomes, the fewer cultural and moral touchstones audiences share.
It’s a vicious cycle.
The good news is that the Pop Cult can’t change human nature.
Hollywood’s disastrous 2023 gives us a hopeful sign that the Pop Cult’s spell is finally wearing off.
Younger folks may be finding their way out of the Millennial Hall of Mirrors.
In the meantime, heed author Jeffro Johnson and read some pre-1980 books.
Looking for a like-minded group of writers and readers who’ve left the Hall of Mirrors? Access our patron-exclusive Discord for rousing conversation. And get first looks at my new works in progress.
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Jeffro deserves a ton of credit. Because of him I read several of the original Tarzan books, Manly Wade Wellman, Jules de Grandin (who is both an arrogant jerk and eminently likeable), and several more. I’m hardly an uncultured fool (for our generation, at least), but I’d either never heard of these, or only seen cheap 4th-generation copies.
Again, many thanks to Jeffro.
“who is both an arrogant jerk and eminently likeable”
That’s a rare and valuable skill.
And yes, I do mind piracy.
Then I apologize and will try not to repeat the error. On the other hand, this one appears to be legit:
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV21N03193303/page/n3/mode/2up
No worries. Thanks for sharing.
It’s only fairly recently that I read Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” stories and the novels of H. Rider Haggard (“King Solomon’s Mines”). Both are great material, partly because they’re not built around blank-slate characters. In fact their protagonists are likely to be a challenge for some modern readers, since none are exactly driven by a nihilistic sense of “tolerance” or always being vaguely pure good.
Where there is no shared story, real or fictional, there isn’t a shared culture or set of values that can keep a society from collapse.
As a kid in the 90s whose most formative engagement with Star Wars was its thriving Expanded Universe in novels, games, comics, and toys, prior to the Prequel Trilogy, it was an interesting experience that struck a unique balance. Part of the appeal for Star Wars was always its incredibly visceral and believable setting, that made imagining yourself in it seem quite natural. The world of Star Wars was a place that was exciting to hang out. The EU material played into this, often with great success.
I always loved playing the games, and playing with toys, that made me feel like I was participating in the world of Star Wars; not to impose my own whims on it, but to partake, more like going on vacation than playing god. What was interesting is that this experience complemented, rather than replaced, the source material. I thought Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were awesome, but could appreciate them for their own merits while also engaging in the setting in a more personal, subjective way through the EU. It was a unique balance that modern IPs have totally lost, and could really stand to learn from.
Especially Disney Star Wars, which has obviously plunged so far into the narcissistic self-insert fantasy that it all feels like an indulgent parody at this point. The EU at its best told stories that believably fit into the surrounding Star Wars mythos established by the films. When you read Timothy Zahn’s novels, or played Dark Forces, or battled your friends with their Action Fleet toys, or did the collectible card game, it respected and honored the source material, and certainly didn’t try to cut it down.
A lot of the warped perception comes from misunderstanding the purpose of stories in the first place. Look at how often such consumers will judge a tale based on how it “subverted their expectations” and “defied tropes” and one quickly discerns realizes that they want to feel smarter and more clever than others. They want this more than they want to relate or connect to others.
I can’t count the times I was looking up old pulp or classic fairy tales and saw the comments filled with people who complained about “datedness” or being able to guess the ending (By which I mean “the good guy wins and the bad guy loses”) when . . . that has always been the point? People never read stories to be fooled, often they read them despite knowing the ending.
Recently, I read an article that tried to tarnish the inventor of the hard-boiled detective, Carroll John Daly, as a hack, despite being the third most popular author that ran in the legendary Black Mask magazine, because he wasn’t “realistic” and had romantic visions of knights in shining armor, all while the author of the piece ignored the fact that he was still one of the most popular writers in one of the most important magazines of the 20th century. He cared more about his subversive cool guy identity than he did about truth or understanding. (I wrote about it on Twitter/X here: https://twitter.com/wastelandJD/status/1744948230163509664)
Once I started seeing storytelling as a reflection of truth, and that “good” and “bad” was more about craft and morality than cleverness, I was able to understand a lot more about what makes the medium so special.
On the plus side, Zoomers do seem to understand the purpose of stories better than Mills do. Most any of them I come across (that aren’t brain-rotted) focus pretty heavily on quality over cleverness and it tends to give them a sharpness and no nonsense approach we haven’t seen since the pulp days. I can only hope this trend continues.
We need to get out of our rut as thinking of art as trivial nonsense that is either meaningless or a weapon to be wielded at our enemies.
JD Cowan – Just a heads up, when clicking on your screenname, the link leads to a “not found” page. There’s an extra “A” in the URL.