Ace attorney is so funny for making a game where you play as a lawyer whose assistant lets him talk to dead people and the only dead person he talks to is a smarter, better lawyer
all cyberpunk stories are like “If you wanna crack open a cybercroissant this nasty, you’re gonna need a real top notch e-driller. i know a guy- Toledo Killswitch- he’s got the frag ordinance you need to grizzle this bocce ball.”
i have a theory that any franchise that lasts long enough eventually becomes incestuous and ends up eating its own tail, thematically. stories in these franchises can only ever comment on themselves
i think a lot about what alan moore said about his work on the killing joke, about how hollow it is in hindsight since the theme really just boils down to "batman and the joker are kinda similar when you think about it", which i suppose is a pretty novel observation, certainly changes the way i read batman comics, but what is there in that insight for me as a human being living in the real world that i can apply to my actual life? not a whole lot. all it can do is reward emotional investment in the brand of batman. if you don't really give a shit about batman there's nothing there for you.
the disney era of star wars is especially bad about this. by and large they're really just about our relationship to star wars. even the last jedi, which tries to be a little more critical about it, still can't break out of the thematic black hole the franchise has become. andor is possibly the only exception to this, and i steadfastly believe that was a total fluke. don't get it twisted, andor is good despite its connection to star wars, not because of it, and if it were just an original tv show about resisting space fascism, it would probably be better for it (if less popular). we're all lowkey dreading the second season bc we know that no star wars property can resist devolving into a nostalgia wank fest forever
there's nothing inherently wrong with hollow entertainment, but i do think there's something grotesque about pumping the gdp of a small nation into an entertainment product that doesn't aspire to be anything more than an advertisement for itself