Cure Dragon 255 wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2024 12:38 pmI love this post, not only because its hilarious, but rather I was bracing myself for "Oh great, now Baby Boomers, Gen X'ers AND Millenials can join in on the arrested development and REFUSING TO GROW THE FUCK UP."
Baby Boomers have, broadly speaking as a collective whole anyway, just about never cared that much about their childhood cartoons. Baby Boomers are plenty nostalgic, but generally they most often tend to get nostalgic about stuff from their younger adulthoods, roughly around college age and onward. Music, cars, cultural events, stuff like that.
There's certainly a tiny little bit of nostalgia from them for stuff like old Hanna-Barbera cartoons every now and then, but that always takes a firm backseat (rightly so) to stuff like The Beatles, Elvis, civil rights protests, the hippie movement, etc.
Gen X'ers are more or less the same, certainly in my experience at least. There's certainly maybe an ever so slight few more of them who care a bit about childhood ephemera relative to Boomers: but not by a whole lot, and certainly nowhere
near to the extremes of Millennials. Most of them are former Grunge kids with way, way, vastly more nostalgia invested (again, rightly so) in Nirvana, Tupac, NIN, Tarantino movies, the early internet, and stuff from their high school and college years (which as it happens is also largely stuff from my own childhood years) more so than childhood.
Hell, Lilith Fair, Lollapalooza, and the Riot Grrrl movement have vastly more nostalgia cache among Gen X'ers than does whatever crap was on kids' TV in the 70s. Star Wars is probably the most overpoweringly childhood-centric fixture of Gen X'ers by a mile, but nothing else really comes close to that otherwise.
And its not hard to see why it shakes out like this: both those generations simply had a whole lot more going for them in their adult years than Millennials have had: which is in no small part why so many Millennials have ended up spending their 20s and 30s pining obsessively for being children again.
And honestly at this point,
Zoomers/Gen Z have for a few years now seemed to be as fed up with the whole "cartoon obsessed manchildren" shtick as I've long-since been, and I for one am all here for it.
I've seen more than my share of Zoomers viciously and mercilessly roast millennials for the cartoon/childhood fixation in ways that make anything I've ever said about it publicly on these forums seem absolutely tame and benign in comparison, and it never, ever fails to make me cackle in delight anytime it happens.
Its certainly way the hell long past overdue at this point.
This one in particular has lived rent free in my head for like 4 years now (and I couldn't agree more with it):
So yeah, the way things seem to be trending the past several years or so, it looks like Millennials might just end up being all alone on this particular ledge.
Fair to say, even though I'm a
Xennial (I'm right smack on the dividing line between Gen X and Millennial, making me simultaneously kind of both and neither at the same time) I tend to get along with and have much more common ground with Zoomers than I've ever had with Millennials. (Similarly, a great deal of my closest friends when I was a kid growing up were Gen X'ers, who were slightly older than me).
I've spent the better part of the last 7 years working with a lot of Gen Z folks in my real life work, and they've almost always been some of the most amazing, level-headed, and grounded people I've met in many years. And yes, we usually both roll our eyes at and make fun of shit like this with regards to Millennials whenever it comes up.
This webcomic up here? 100% factual, can confirm.
Cure Dragon 255 wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2024 6:05 pmHe hates the whole "CHILHOOD PWNS" take the internet has and how they only focus on vapid kids shows.
At this point, it definitely isn't "the internet" writ large that has this outlook anymore. It certainly WAS a good majority of the internet maybe a decade/decade and a half ago (I certainly remember and do not at all miss that): but times have finally changed and, as noted, the younger generations don't seem to be nearly as on board with this mindset as so many Millennials were (and in many cases, still are).
Which y'know... good on them. It should never have been this much of a thing to begin with in the first place.
Cure Dragon 255 wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2024 6:05 pmBut I guess, much like me but on the opposite side, there wasnt really any new ground to cover and just called it a day.
Nah, there's still loads and loads of material on that topic that's plenty ripe for a deep dive discussion/analysis. And I mean a genuinely serious and substantive one, not simply mean-spirited heckling and mocking: all kidding aside, that's really not something I have any interest at all whatsoever in doing with this.
As much as folks who only see what I write on this forum may think I've unloaded on that topic already, believe me I haven't gone into
nearly the kind of depth or nuance on this topic publicly on here as I have in private off the forums.
I'd toyed with making a whole dedicated thread for it on here a long, long time ago to really take a harsh, soberingly critical and analytic eye to this whole phenomenon on like a wide, broad scale: but it never wound up panning out. Mostly because I didn't have the energy or patience at the time to deal with the barrage of hostility that such a topic would no doubt engender on a forum like this one, and I frankly just had vastly more important IRL shit to worry about.
And now, I'm not sure the topic is really as necessary or warranting of a big thread analysis at this point since, like I said, the cultural pendulum seems to be (
finally) swinging back the other way as Gen Z grows further into adulthood and they seem to largely be having that desperately needed "Wait a minute, what the fuck are we even doing here?" moment of self-aware clarity that most Millennials have never seemed to have had (and badly, badly needed to have had since a good many years ago now) on this particular subject.
Even on this very forum here, there's been a subtle, but noticeable attitude shift on this in more recent years: without naming any names or putting anyone needlessly or unfairly on the spot, lets just say there've been at least a few notable oldies from here who certainly
used to be of this particular persuasion - for like, a good long, loooooong while - who have thankfully seem to have just started to grow past it since at least a few years ago (better late than never), and plenty of younger/newer members here have also shown to have a vastly more rounded and intellectually curious view of art and media far beyond the boundaries of children's television schlock than most anyone who was active on here ten or fifteen+ years back.
2005 or 2006 up through maybe as late as 2017/2018 represented a lot of the absolute most excessive worst of it. Give or take. So about a good ten years and change stretch there.
Maybe though, since its now starting to be moved past (little by little) as Gens Y and Z shift ahead, it can be looked
back on in a more retrospective lens rather than examined as a current/present day thing? That might be a better/more fitting angle to examine it from now in the 2020s, compared to back in the 2000s and 2010s: even though, as noted, we're still as of presently kind midway through the transition and aren't entirely/fully past it yet. I dunno. Something to mull over maybe.
In hindsight, a big part of me definitely regrets that I didn't go really deeply into this specific rabbit hole on here a decade/decade and a half ago during the apex period of it. But it was just such a hyper sensitive hornet's nest/minefield of a topic to navigate, particularly at that time. And like I said, real life was just very, very chaotic on my end during that period and I had much bigger shit to devote that time and energy towards. And who am I kidding, I STILL do even today presently.