Over the years, I’ve dedicated what feels like miles of page inches to nostalgia in light of generational theory. Other counterculture figures have gone to great lengths showing how the outdated demographic models fail to account for the increasing rate of social change.
It’s not hard to understand. If your behavior models are based on lumping in those who came of age before 9/11 and pre-smarthphone with kids who grew up online, you won’t get accurate predictions.
Related: Lost Generations
The forgotten cohort of Generation Y comes up a lot because it corrects for many of the problems with those obsolete models. Gen Y is like a missing piece that fills in part of the generational puzzle.
Among the puzzles that acknowledging Gen Y helps solve is the uneven age demographic representation we seen in the nostalgia movement. Western pop culture has been stuck in restrospective mode for a quarter of a century. It’s reached the point that circus performers hired to look pretty in 1980s Brand X skinsuits are accorded the moral authority once reserved for the Magisterium.
Related: The Pop Cult Demoralization Trap
That’s because Millennials aren’t the primary driver of nostalgia-based outrage drama. They were brought up to shun anything that happened before they were born as regressive and problematic. They also lack the spending power to effect major change.
Gen Xers with fond memories of pre-death cycle corporate IPs contribute to the nostalgia movement, but they’re not main driving force. Being a dissident means detecting patterns. Most stereotypes contain a kernal of truth, and X-ers’ cynicism keeps them from getting too excited about Pop Cult product en masse.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
The Pop Cult is a Gen Y phenomenon. Its high priests leverage nostalgia for the “golden age” of the 80s and 90s to funnel adherents into the Death Cult. Few Xers are sufficiently nostalgia-drunk for that ploy to work on them. A lot of Millennials are already Death Cultists. Gen Y keeps the Pop Cult in existence.
That means Pop Cult nostalgia has a limited shelf life. As others have pointd out, there will be no nostalgia movement for entertainment product released after Cultural Ground Zero. And that’s because rehashing the following two decades would be an exercise in redundancy. You can’t be nostalgic for World of Warcraft, the MCU, and Joe Biden when they’re all still with us.
If nothing else, megacorps selling Gen Y’s childhood back to them gives the grift away. Let that be a reminder: Don’t pay people who hate you.
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All of this has given Gen Y a much larger impact on the entertainment industry than we really should have. Gen X isn’t too considered with mainstream entertainment at all. Gen Jones and the boomers are largely interested in the exact same shows that they grew up with (i.e. not revivals.) To the extent that they go into new stuff at all, the formulaic sitcoms and dramas on local networks have them covered.
When it comes to millennials and zoomers, the ones keyed into pop culture will literally watch anything. “It’s the hot new show” is enough to get them to tune it, but it doesn’t matter if it is Star Wars or super heroes or Yogi Bear or whatever.
This makes Gen Y the only generational group that actually cares about franchise identity, and thus new franchises consistently try to mine things that Gen Y has heard about. There is also the problem that since this is the game that they’ve played for 20 years now, that means that even if they wanted to mine new franchises, there are plenty few new franchises which can be mined (largely existing only in video games.)
I noticed how absurd this can get with the X-Men ’97 cartoon which is very clearly trying to cash in on X-Men nostalgia… except the X-Men have been a cultural force since the 60’s and have been consistently in movies since the 00’s. Yet “X-Men nostalgia” has to be specifically mean people who watched the X-Men cartoon from the 90’s, since only Gen Y cares about such things.
One place where millennials and zoomers have an advantage over Gen Y is that if they get out of the modernity trap, it’s easy for them to appreciate things from many different time periods. So for example if they finally decided to watch movies from before Iron Man, then it’s easy for them to watch something from the 90’s as it is for them to watch The Wizard of Oz, or Hitchcock’s various classics, or the works of Humphrey Bogart, etc. In contrast Gen Y tends to have trouble going back before the 80’s (even though we really should be able to do that, considering that everyone I knew as a kid watched at least a few pre-80’s movies.)
“Gen Jones and the boomers are largely interested in the exact same shows that they grew up with (i.e. not revivals.)”
The programming on PBS testifies to this truth. Along with a cable channel, for real, named “MeTV”
Yeah, I have kids, some of whom are teenagers. It’s really weird to me that media is no longer aimed at kids. My kids have no interest in any modern entertainment except maybe Bluey. They go find Chinese-made shows like Magic Mixies (or the older Lego Elves) that only existed to sell toys and watch those. Or they’re big into the Undertale/Deltarune scene, or they’re into Amazing Digital Circus or Skibidi Toilets. The up and coming stuff are the little youtube creators, and that’s who they watch. And it’s so weird to me to see the big companies absolutely ignoring this. Except maybe not everybody, because today at the store I saw that Time Magazine was doing a feature issue on Pokemon. (Also it’s weird to me that the gossip mags don’t follow any of the self-made internet celebs, only old people from a couple generations ago. My mom said it’s because only celebs who were made in the old paradigm count as celebs, you can’t have done it yourself.)
“My mom said it’s because only celebs who were made in the old paradigm count as celebs, you can’t have done it yourself.”
Your Mom is correct. 🙂 The 20th century involves wholly owned global celebrities. Yes, they all worked hard, but they also had the blessing of the corporatists environment that would parasite off of them and make them famous.
YouTube produce “B list” celebs who are entirely too independent. Even Mr. Beast is too independent. Thus the gossip magazines and the whole system simply ignore them.
One company that I’ve noticed gets consistently overlooked when it comes to Gen Y nostalgia farming is Hasbro. They’ve been slowly consolidating ownership of tons of 80s and 90s IPs for years, and they’ve recently been leveraging a considerable number of those IPs into a shared tabletop RPG system (which seems odd to me, given that Hasbro still currently owns Wizards of the Coast, and by extension D&D, so why they didn’t just use the current 5e system is beyond my understanding…)
How bad is it? Well, this year’s Free RPG Day offering from that publisher appears to be a crossover between Transformers, GI Joe, Power Rangers, and My Little Pony.
Hoo boy. I’m tempted to try to snag a copy just to see how bad the writing is in terms of justifying this IP mashup.