#the price of knowledge... reading extensive text. 💔

[tesseractrave]

You make very good points, but this is not really about loving something despite poor animation. Writing? Maybe. I'm finding I didn't elaborate very well in my original post. This is more about the ideas represented and normalized behind certain content. Maybe I could consider it propaganda, I am applying it to pretty much everything.

For example: Cybertrucks. Most of us can agree that those are pretty bad, right? They're a dangerously poorly-made cultural statement, and their origins are inherently problematic, but there are people out there who love them because they look cool, or they're supposed to be "durable." That's how far what I'm talking about applies, though I admit it is worse when it gets to storytelling media (books, shows, movies, podcasts, etc.), which is something even more people love.

New Example: An acquaintance of mine said that they were "very excited from the new live-action Lilo and Stitch trailer and were excited to see it in theaters." On the surface level, and probably in their perspective, that's just a remake movie; movies come out all the time. They don't notice or think about how it's possibly a cultural erasure attempt or corporate trend-following cashgrab.

Storytelling media is something people feel very passionate about because it's easy to be excited by colors and music and classic, cinematic emotional conveyence/manipulation. With things like individual characters and dynamics put into the mix, everyone is affected, even me, which can lead to people resorting to trying to separate the art from the artist, and maybe even things like pieces of the media from the media itself.

For Example: Star Wars and its Disney sequels. Star Wars is a political, philosophical commentary and a prominent story in modern American culture. Even though the sequels undid and arguably ruined a lot of the original coherence and important commentative narrative of the original (both in writing and production), I like Kylo Ren/Ben Solo a lot; Adam Driver put a lot of love and care into his character's narrative and I find myself having to separate him from the media.

(This doesn't really apply to just... fun, poorly-made ideas. Like the Super Mario Bros Supershow, some of them are just laughable and nostalgic and "whatever." They aren't a culture piece or a commentary on anything. I know an artist who really likes the movie Cool World. Poorly-made, but from what I can tell, it hurts no one.)

This is unfortunately why I have to be delicate and sort of vague with a lot of the stories that actually do apply to this topic. Star Wars is a safer, dead horse to be beaten about it, but there's a lot of ruthlessly defensive others I can name with communities that seem unable to have complex relationships with what they're passionate about or hear "hey, this kind of unintentionally disrespects and undermines a lot of important concepts and unfortunately that's not good." It's not always sequels or remakes, either. We may be circling back around to the cybertruck example!

I'm sure a lot of the surface-level intentions for the many people both consuming and involved in organizing/creating certain things aren't truly malicious, but I think there's a lot of oversight on the "why"s and "should"s, and what they might be normalizing or affecting, and how it might turn things worse against their hopes.

Maybe I'm just stressed that there's just too much heedless impulse in everything.

It sucks seeing people react positively to something so poorly and detrimentally made that it lets me know they have no fundamental understanding of what they're being passionate about and very obviously just took the surface-level meaning portrayed to them with colors and music and ran with it because it makes me feel like I'm on the recieving end of the "Why can't you just let people have fun?" "Can't people just like things anymore?" "Doesn't everyone have their own perspective?" questions. You can have fun, but I can't take you seriously.