Spend enough time with Millennials, and you’ll notice their conversations often gravitate toward their favorite pop culture franchises. For many, these brands aren’t just entertainment—they’ve become extensions of their identities.
It’s not unusual for people of any age to fantasize about being part of their beloved stories, and that goes double for Generation Y. However, what sets Millennials apart is how central self-projection has become to their engagement with fiction. For many, self-immersive participation in a narrative isn’t just a pastime; it’s the only way they know how to connect with stories.
This phenomenon has grown so pervasive that younger adults might struggle to understand how to enjoy fiction without inserting themselves into it.
How did this loss of narrative objectivity take root?
Related: Millennial Snot and the Pop Cult: Worship in a Soulless Age
The answer is as straightforward as it is unsettling: This phenomenon is a byproduct of emotional manipulation–the same strategy that makes propaganda so effective.
Propaganda thrives on creating characters who act as blank slates designed for the audience to project their own desires, fears, and identities onto. These characters aren’t just relatable; they become extensions of the viewer. So when the character triumphs, often by espousing values carefully selected by the creators, the audience gets a dopamine hit.
For Millennials raised on this form of storytelling, other approaches to fiction can feel alien. The saturation of propagandistic Narratives has dulled their ability to appreciate heroes driven by ideals greater than themselves.
Traditional myths and legends once provided moral and cultural frameworks for society. Stories like the Odyssey, the tales of King Arthur, and even pulp classics like John Carter and Tarzan offered heroes who pursued universal truths or noble ideals.
In contrast, many of today’s stories cater to niche demographics, reducing heroes to surface-level traits. Take the Star Wars sequels as an example: Their protagonists are more identifiable by their representation of certain groups than by any moral depth. Similarly, Marvel Studios has gone all in on identity-focused storytelling to diminishing returns.
The problem isn’t just the characters; it’s the worldview that’s shaping them. For a generation trained to see morality as relative and subjective, heroes driven by objective good seem unrelatable; even, paraodoxically enough, immoral.
Related: Millennials’ Generational Poverty
The demolition of shared cultural and moral foundations has fed into a storytelling cycle of increasingly shallow protagonists. As societies become more fragmented, stories reflect that division, offering characters designed to appeal to specific, isolated audiences.
This fragmentation leaves Millennials trapped in a phantom zone of applauding mirrors. Stories reflect their own identities back at them but offer little of substance.
Despite this generational fracturing, there’s reason for optimism. The string of failures from the big movie, game, and comic book studios suggests that cracks in the Pop Cult are beginning to show. Audiences are tiring of formulaic Narratives and hollow characters.
Human nature has a way of rejecting the superficial. The enduring popularity of timeless legends and even pulp fiction suggests that people crave stories with depth, universal truths, and heroes who pursue a greater good.
Perhaps the next generation of creators will turn away from the mirror, look to the window, and rediscover the richness of storytelling.
Get early looks at my works in progress, the chance to influence my writing, and VIP access to my exclusive Discord.
Sign up at Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
Thrill to the best dark, not bleak, fantasy
Quest with relatable heroes against overwhelming odds
The boring blank slate protagonist has caused incalculable damage to modern storytelling, with Harry Potter and Bella of Twilight infamy being notable examples. These characters do absolutely nothing to inspire or spur readers to greatness; they’re basically self inserts for elaborate masturbatory fantasies.
Even the “spunky teen rebel” archetype, like Katiniss from Hunger Games or Rey from Disney Star Wars, are defined entirely by being in opposition to a monolithic bloc that’s just a stand-in for whatever the Current Year considers problematic at the moment. They display no actual sense of morality or virtue, with only a transparent layer of heroism: the external form, with no moral foundation behind it.
This is a stark contrast to someone like Luke Skywalker, whose climactic act is to reject anger and show love to his father, and through that, evil is ultimately defeated. This kind of heroism rooted in Christian virtue is nonexistent in modern mainstream media, where shallow vengeance and vindictiveness replaces it.
That is why heroic tales of virtuous protagonists winning by embracing Christian morals – without overtly on-the-nose Christian references – must be what we aim for.
Some will say the “blank slate” protagonist is due to women writers, but that’s not really the case. You will struggle to find stories written by women before the ’60s feminist wave that are like this. Even other modern writers like Hinton, Brackett, or O’Connor, do not write like this. This is a Current Year problem brought about by modern audiences being unable to relate to anyone who falls outside the narrow definition of what they consider a person. This is how they were taught, after all: pull what benefits you out of the text and leave everything behind including the author. It was always inherently selfish, and this is where it’s lead.
“Modern audiences” engage in stories to have their worldview blandly read back to them in one singular monotone speech pattern. Unfortunately, since their worldview is very myopic and one note, so too are their stories. This is why they have to pilfer the past. They can’t create so they have to erase and rewrite what came before.
Millennials, unfortunately, were patient zero to the Baby Boomers’ experiment to pass on what they were taught via Mass Media by the Good People in charge. It’s no wonder it fried them so badly.
Over the 20th century Culture became Mass Media which became Pop Culture which then became Geek Culture. All of them are a decayed and misshapen version of what came before and all were changed to specifically experiment on their youth. Of course all of it failed, but that doesn’t matter. They’re still trying even though shared culture in the West has been utterly blown to bits.
At this point all that can be done is to salvage the lost souls adrift in this madness. The masters who were to rule over them certainly won’t do that.
I see this issue most in video games, especially in RPGs with their blank-slate main characters. Now I know that early games have silent protagonists in spades, but that was a product a time where video games are still grappling with narratives/story and the focus was more on the gameplay, and maybe the world. But seeing silent/blank slate protagonists in RPGs with plot and characterizations that wouldn’t be out of place in a novel (looking at you, Fire Emblem: Three Houses) is just odd; those guys stick out like a sore thumb. I get that the medium simply lends itself to this, but not every vidya hero need to be a mute, uninteresting meatbag who takes a backseat to the more interesting supporting character who should have been the actual hero.
There are other valid reasons to use a blank slate character, such as in Fallout – there, your character absolutely DOES have personality and agency, but the blank past permits the player to decide that personality for themselves through dialogue and actions. I haven’t played the newer Fire Emblems, so I can’t comment on them, but I can’t see the appeal of having a true blank slate in a story as intricate as Three Houses.
Actually, something occurred to me – the blank slate characters in modern FE are all the result of FE Awakening’s success. The blank slate character worked there, so they’ve been copying it over and over into the newer games. From what info I’ve heard, there was a sizable internal faction urging the studio to double down on the “dating sim” elements of that game too, by making it more lurid and more involved. Thankfully that faction seems to have been shot down, or at least tamed somewhat, but it’s a bit disheartening seeing them learn bad lessons from success.