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Just Elsbeth™ Things [3/∞] ↳ 2.16 Hot Tub Crime Machine

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Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good — Wicked: For Good (2025)

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DOCTOR WHO The Reality War

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THE PITT (2025–)

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Wicked (2024) // Wicked: For Good (2025)

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For centuries, I've watched you fight to protect humanity, while forsaking your own kind. I will destroy you and everything you stand for, with a power you can't even imagine yet.

THE OLD GUARD 2 (2025) dir. Victoria Mahoney

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I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

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you can tell who's watching foundation by the tags to lee pace gifs from the show whether they're dumbfounded by the absence of a belly button or not

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How can this character be dead, if there are 40k stories on AO3 telling me otherwise?

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Robert Carlyle in THE TOURNAMENT (2009)

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If he chooses… to stand between me and my kin I'll split his pretty head open! See if he's still smirking then.

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THE PITT (2025–) 1.09 "3:00 P.M."

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Jess Bush as Christine Chapel and Christina Chong as La'an Noonien Singh — Star Trek | The Serene Squall

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FOUNDATION (2021–) 3.01 A Song for the End of Everything

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I’m thankful for all the different ways I can eat potatoes