Like a story can literally beat someone over the head with a theme or moral and people somehow come to the opposite conclusion?

It’s like “Tyler Durden is so manly and cool” except every bit of media feels like it’s misinterpreted like that now.

  • built_on_hope [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    To add to all the excellent points here, I’d also like to lay the blame on the faux intellectual “gritty” amoral media that was popular in the 2010s. Shows and movies that had no message other than “everyone is a piece of shit deep down and that’s just the way the world is, kiddo”. Looking at you, Game of Thrones

    I feel like these shows trained a whole generation of people to see “realism” as the only / highest standard of media, and neatly destroyed the need for media to have any coherent (let alone vaguely moral) underlying message or theme to be made. If meaningless slop is all you have access to, your ability to think critically about said slop is also diminished