There was a recent wrecker post that did this a lot. It comes across as reactionary to me but sometimes I see leftists doing it too. Nerd culture being associated with being childish/nostalgic and easily exploited by sanitised consumption, etc.
As an autistic person who sometimes gets hyperfixations that could be seen as childish, it feels gross to have people paint these hobbies as some kind of uniquely hyperconsumerist thing, because 90% of the time it’s just because the hobby is seen as childish and/or neurodivergent coded.
For example: I was hyperfixated on gardening for a while. It was expensive, really hard to do ethically and the industry itself is massively corporate and responsible for some of the biggest environmental problems today. It’s a nice little escapist hobby where you can turn your mind off while you pretend you aren’t fucking up your local biome because Monsanto decided it would sell more soil wetter, plant disease cures and fertilizer ifs product kills the soils ability to self regulate. I tried to do it the organic permaculture way, ended up being too expensive and half of the products were not in fact as ethical as they pretended to be. Also I have a degree in Ecology, most gardners don’t have that luxury and are not trained how to garden ethically. Never once have I ever seen anyone call gardening a vapid corporate hobby or expressed concern that I was using my fake little biome to escape from the real world. Never once have I been lumped in with the same people who invented DDT. Because it’s a socially acceptable hobby for a well adjusted adult to have.
I can’t say the same for when I had a Pokemon hyperfixation. It was a relatively cheap hobby, I mostly just played the games and the rom hacks were fun. But I stopped because who wants to be associated with grown ass adults waiting in line for cards and playing a childrens game! They must be mentally ill in some way, right? Now adults who still like a hobby they grew up with get put into the same camp as Harry Potter fans, who we have apparently now have decided are bad because Harry Potter is childish and whimsical, not because the writer is a racist transphobe.
Just something that mulls over in my head sometimes, because social dynamics that make no sense to me are another thing I like to fixate on and dissect for fun. I tend to see how the flow of popular narratives can manipulate people into adopting reactionary talking points. All you have to do is trojan something onto a socially acceptable target without outright saying the target and you have even leftists redirected to attack a target that the right want dead. People are funny.
Thanks for reading my weird rant. I could just be coming across as insecure and making myself an easy target for wreckers to get a rant from, but eh who cares.
I’ve often seen the same thing, with “grow up” and “arrested development” being used as thought-terminating cliches to pathologize predominantly neurodiverse people. It’s one of those things that turns everybody into an armchair psychiatrist, usually to misapply a psychology term to mean “bad inferior person I can righteously harass/abuse.”
Just to be a bit of a devil’s advocate, there’s value in broadening cultural horizons. As an example: I love me some anime and cartoons, and while they are not as stigmatized as when I was younger, they are often associated as childish.
However, I’m a grown ass millennial and have also watched The Seventh Seal and other “adult” films.
I think if you never bother to try other genres, texts, etc that’s not good even if you are hyper fixated.
This is, I think, also why the Harry Potter ppl must be disciplined even beyond the politics. If you haven’t bothered to go beyond the things you read in your youth, you’re not growing as a reader. You can have affection, nostalgia, love, etc. but part of being an adult is recognizing that those things are limited because of the youthful audience and leave things out of their stories that are enjoyable to experience.
Tldr enjoy what you like but if you only consume YA fiction (or insert thing here - anime, scifi, fantasy, genre etc.) consider broadening your taste and horizon. Then by all means continue enjoying whatever you enjoy. To some extent op seems to be articulating this best possible version, but there are ppl who haven’t gone there and need to be told to try new things
Yeah nowhere in my post did I state that people should only consume one form of media. It was more about public perception and assumptions surrounding that and how it is harmful. The problem is if you have have one childish interest, people assume that it is the only type of media you consume or that certain types of media are more mature than others simply because of perceived demographic.
I have found lot of stuff for adult consumers to be just as prone to being limited as stuff that people see is for children. Perceived demographic often isn’t the deciding factor on how deep something is or what you can get out of it. The thing that drew me back into pokemon in the first place is that the meta of the competitive scene has some pretty complex rpg elements. Pokemon is seen as a childrens game and I’m sure most of the marketing team sees it that way too, but the actual game has always had the message that pokemon is something for any age or gender to enjoy.
Yes, there are plenty of things out there that are very much for kids only but there is a tendancy to immediately assume the entire target audience of something based on aesthetics. Which can lead to some childish looking things being incorrectly diagnosed as shallow, and some gritty looking things incorrectly diagnosed as deep and mature. The Odyessy is for adults, it’s an okay movie and I enjoyed it but there was nothing intellectual or challenging in that movie that made me grow as a person, so should it really fit the criteria for ‘this is for adults’ if the only thing adult about it is that blood and death might scare kids?
To put it another way:
Me: “I like watching unique animation from time to time because I respect the technical artistic skill involved and the history of animation is very interesting to me. I particularly love when artstyles are experimented with.”
Chud: “I like Jack Reacher because he’s cool and manly”
Everyone else: “Clearly Chud here is the normal mature adult while Dort_Owl here watches cartoons so probably never intellectually challenges themself or grows as a person.”
I tend to go into things judging them by their own merits rather than worrying about who the market thinks it’s for. If a thing is good, it’s good. It might be a stubborn hangover from when people used to tell me “You can’t play video games, they’re for boys, not girls.”
But the idea that I’m somehow stupid or broken because of what I like without understanding why I like what I like and only seeing one or two of my interests as an indicator of my entire range frustrates me to no end. Especially as someone who has challenged myself in a lot of ways most people haven’t had to
I remember one time on the SomethingAwful forums a guy tried to do a Let’s Play of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers and allowed users to submit original characters for recruitment. This lasted a few updates before a flood of people from one of the other subforums discovered the thread and immediately flooded it with comments calling the OP a disgusting pathetic broken manchild and speculating about the various mental defects they believed he had. Eventually one of the LP forum mods (who had previously approved the thread) locked it and told the original poster he couldn’t do the LP anymore.
A Let’s Play with X-Com that did the exact same thing with user-submitted soldiers was completely uncontroversial and in fact widely regarded by the site as one of its best because I guess pretending to shoot aliens is more grown-up and mature than pretending to be a cute monster.
A friend of mine keeps recommending Explorers of Sky to me because I liked Red Rescue Team back in the day, but yeah that whole attitude of judgement for being in my 30s playing Pokemon is keeping me from it. It’s hypocritical that I’ve let it sour my enjoyment I know. I’ve got the rom somewhere though so maybe I’ll give it a shot one day if it is actually something people think I’d enjoy.
I wish there was a mystery dungeon with Rowlet. I think they stopped making them by the time Sun and Moon was a thing.
It’s not hypocritical, it’s an unfortunately appropriate act of self preservation in response to a hostile world.
I’ve played it and I enjoyed it, though I strongly recommend having a turbo button in reach.
Even more to your point, the target demo being kids doesn’t actually make it so only children can reasonably get something out of it. There is lots of media that is clearly made overwhelmingly for kids (or for parents to get for their kids) that still has depth and lots of interesting things to engage with in it. As a personal example, I think that some of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen are great and totally worth reading as an adult if one has any interest in them.
Yeah, just to be clear, I’m talking about the kind of person who finds out someone likes stuffed animals or whatever and immediately, without knowing anything else about them, goes DEFCON 1 with a non-zero chance of advocating eugenics.