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.
To answer your actual prompt yeah, that’s a shitty thing people do, and even though I don’t get it that much I’m already sick of hearing it from people who think the peak of cinema is Silence of the Lambs or Nolan’s Odyssey or whatever. As another commenter said, it’s good to be able to engage with other media and broaden one’s horizons and not just watch the same 14 episodes of Mr. Bean over and over again, but that applies as much to them as to you or me.
Granted, I usually don’t tell people about my reading a lot of manga, but that’s more because of the sicko shit that manga/anime is known for having when I just want to watch funny muscle men punch each other and shit like that (love the current Hunter x Hunter release, even though I don’t think a punch has been thrown in H x H in like 6 years).
I’m hesitant on the more general phrasing in the title because I think the issue in what I just discussed is a wrongful association between hyperfixation and childishness, or like an implied sicko virtue ethics view of childish people being morally inferior or something. We agree that maturing is a good and healthy thing to do, right? The disagreement between us and the people giving us these accusations is over a) what constitutes maturing and immaturity, which I think is the direct issue and b) whether an immature person should still be treated as a person rather than with moralizing contempt, which I think is a more fundamental issue motivating the former.
It is a two fold problem with maturity, as it is often discussed. If maturity is letting everyone enjoy what they like then telling a shopping addict that their hobby is quite environmentally destructive isn’t mature according to many, and most if I am being honest, if maturing is about contributing to the world then having an idle hobby or even neurodivergence which doesn’t contribute to something is not mature. Problem in my eyes is that we can’t ever win in the argument maturity because stigmatisation of people who don’t conform to a standard set by society are always looked down upon, being interested in science is good but only if it is physics, chemistry, or biology, social sciences or science about autistic (except trying to find a cure to autism that is popular even in leftist circles) is never taken seriously. No matter what we do, hobbies enjoyed by disabled and neurodivergent will always seen as lesser compared if a ‘normal’ person does it, a cis white able-bodied man can like super smash brothers but it’ll always be ‘a quirky hobby for a simple man’ but if a disabled person plays the same game as an interest then it is seen as a waste of time because disabled people are only meant to work and sleep 6 hours, if they need more then tough luck for them, this is how most of the able bodied people see the disabled people, undeserving people who constantly step out of line instead of doing their work with head down then eating their ration and going to sleep. No conversation on maturity will solve this problem, I know you didn’t say it will but maturity conversation is just a symptom of this phenomenon, see how they talk about maturity amount themselves, to them maturity-immaturity are dialectical and they keep learning whole life even if they learn to accept the other person who is different. All their problems are for us, we are immature for liking things, we are lazy for resting and not staying up studying/working like them, we are the scroungers who shouldn’t be accepted into a friendship or relationship of any kind, we are scum of the earth, everything the bourgeois says about the ‘normal’ worker, the ‘normal worker’ says about us.
I reiterate the issue about moralizing and the fact that it is not a necessity of considering maturity to be a good thing that immature people are morally inferior.
Beyond that, I think there are lots of other much more useful ways to define maturity, though of course we still shouldn’t moralizing about it. I think maturity in its most general sense is probably best defined by not letting one’s emotions get the best of them, e.g. acknowledging truths that are uncomfortable, not attacking people just because you’re mad, etc. This is obviously not an equally easy proposition for everyone, but surely we can agree that in general it is better for people to try to pursue it to some extent based on their circumstances and capacities, and other people should be supportive of them pursuing it rather than disparaging whatever current state of “immaturity” they have.
Yes I fully agree, I thought out loud a lot there. It wasn’t all meant as a reply, a lot was just rambling
Fair enough!
Yeah you are way better at describing what I was trying to say. Haha, thanks.
I hear good things about Hunter x Hunter. It’s one of those animes along with One Piece that I keep meaning to watch but never get around to. I haven’t read manga in a long time but I enjoyed Dungeon Meshi. The little ecosystem in the dungeon is interesting and it has a great sense of humor. I’ve been meaning to see what the hype for Chainsaw Man is about too but I don’t know if it’s my thing.
Hunter x Hunter is my second favorite manga after Mob Psycho (and the anime is great, it just isn’t caught up). On the bright side, the pacing is incomparably better than One Piece with basically zero filler and between that and the lower amount of material it’s only like 1/9 as long as One Piece’s anime (like 150-something episodes, not 1000-plus). While there is goofy fantasy ecology at the start and, very loosely, some other kinds of ecology in specific arcs, in general it trends away from that pretty quickly and is all about the Hunters fighting other Hunters (except in the biggest arc at the end of the anime, where they fight humanoid magical beasts). What I really like about it is how focused it is on the perspectives of its characters and how they approach problem-solving, including how they sometimes fail to. This “problem solving” is usually expressed in the context of an action fantasy fight, but not always.
I think you’d like HxH if you bear in mind that overall it is going somewhere and has things to say despite it seeming weird and meandering the start, which is not to call the start a chore, it still has lots of interesting and entertaining things about it imo, it just reaches much higher heights later.
I won’t tell you not to watch Chainsaw Man, but I think it’s probably less likely that you’d enjoy it because the whole plot revolves around the sexual pathology of a teenage boy that is handled at certain points in kind of a dubious way. Overall I think it’s a very good manga/anime (the writing is interesting, the art is great, it’s frequently quite funny and sometimes does its horror pretty effectively), but I can’t blame people for bouncing off of it.