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.
Good post, no notes.
Except that I actually think pokemon fandom is having a moment in the sun, there have never been more cool fangames and romhacks. Seems weird to me that anyone would perceive Pokemon fandom the same way as HP, when there are endless multi-hour essays praising the pokeymans games and stuff.
But yes, cringe culture never died and it is horrible.
death to cringe culture
I want to read books targeted to adult audiences. I enjoy more complex stories.
But almost all of them are bland cishet romance slop with the same plots and characters, just different names and locations!
I didn’t enjoy Warrior Cats and Redwall, I found them quite shallow, but there’s still stuff in them to “dig my teeth into”, even if most of it is analyzing and criticism.
Oh, and the fans of these works make neat stuff!
Most romance novels are written so their authors can eat. There is no true passion in that, no writing for “the love of the game”. Fucking sad really.
I think the infantilization of women by way of schooldressed anime girls with cat ears is super weird and everywhere.
I think the infantilization of women by way of schooldressed anime girls with cat ears is super weird and everywhere.
The fuck does this have to do with this thread?
I don’t believe children should hold an exalted status in society.
I guess you must be pretty happy that they’re entirely un-peopled and have zero capability to say “no” to anything by law, then.
On average they don’t have the capacity to understand the world the way adults do,
If you think kids are just stupid, I guess there’s nothing for that.
to say that ‘poor development’ has been used to denigrate disabled people and ipso facto ‘infantilizing’ children is ableist is a weak argument.
What did the r-slur originally mean? Seems like this works both ways to me.
EDIT: well I guess I’d edit my comment to remove all of that garbage too.
Yeah, I deleted it because I don’t have the bandwidth to go in depth about what I wrote or follow through with all the legitimate arguments made in this thread, and because my comments can be construed extremely uncharitably in this thread.
I guess you must be pretty happy that they’re entirely un-peopled and have zero capability to say “no” to anything by law, then.
Oh wow ok, what a generous interpretation of what I meant say. Let me try that: so uh, you disagree with age of consent laws?
If you think kids are just stupid, I guess there’s nothing for that.
You think a lack of an education and reliance on our basest instincts is not reactionary?
You came at me with extreme prejudice so don’t expect a good faith argument from me.
I quoted you directly. Immediately jumping to insinuating that a trans person is a pedo is real smooth. Always gets the crowd going, vonus points for doing it when she’s talking ahout the rights of kids.
You think a lack of an education and reliance on our basest instincts is not reactionary?
You said “they don’t have the capacity to understand the world the way adults do” which sounds a lot more like “innately less intelligent” than “not educated” and lines up nicely with the dehumanisation of kids.
Your take got construed extremely uncharitably because it is bad, sorry:
Fwiw, I do think I have a problem with misapplication of “force” in conversational terms. I went all soft trying to educate a wrecker that got banned, many such cases. I do stand behind what I said though.
I’m going to wear cat ears even when I’m in my 50s
Pokemon
I enjoy the competitive side of pokemon and playing romhacks etc. idgaf what people think and never have.
I agree it’s reactionary and it also turns children into a thing that is lesser than an adult and re-enforces the lack of full humanity of children. Sort of similarly as the comparison between rational (manly) and emotional that works to undermine women.
Being “childish” as an insult is so much more to me than just belittling someone for behaving a certain way. It’s tied to all the nornative assumptions and is extremely privileged white western dude coded to me. As a neurospicy person I’ve always been deeply annoyed by it, as the norms are all so superficial and say nothing about things like the morality or character of the person. Not being childish is civility bs in disguise and using it as an insult kind of plays into these power differentials. A similar thing is “proper language use” and the way people with dialects get othered.
‘Being childish’ can imply many things, one being the lack of capacity for introspection or internal work done to understand the world. Children have the capacity for empathy but they simply lack the years and maturity it takes to understand theory and develop a hollistic world view. To ignore this is to almost place emphasis on our basest instincts and deemphasize the value of education. That’s reactionary.
I hope I’m not being a debate bro and completely missing the point here, I’ll delete this if I am
Truth nuke incoming:
Karl Marx was way too harsh on the Lumpenproletariat, he described them as: “passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society”. This mirrors the behavior you’re describing. A lot of leftists go to the left because they see an ideology that, on the surface promotes a manly badass worker, who saves the world, lead by a very intelligent serious adult man club. A little introspection would go a long way.
It’s probably not a good idea to make Marxism appear like the most boring man-cave in the world.
Using infantilization to falsify things, people and to twist narratives is always going to remain as factually and morally incorrect. This thing happens everywhere - a lot of the time within Lemmy itself; the factors can be age related or other but, the issues circles back to discrimination in general.
This is an issue that’s deeply rooted, as infantilization happens to a variety of minorities. Its hard to ignore once you perceive it. What you’re witnessing - the ableism, is the output of this machine.
The original meaning of the R-slur was literally that the person supposedly had a “delayed” development, so there absolutely is a connection between how we treat disabled people and how we treat children. There’s a wider discussion to be had about how the autonomy of children is contantly denied in most societies, and the USA is a particulaly bad offender in this regard outside all imperial core nations. I’ve always found it shocking and revolting how normalized it is in Amerika to be openly abusive to your kid, how unremarkable it is there to treat your child as your property. But hexbear never had that conversation because too many users immediately fell for the thought-terminating, sectarian and reactionary “there’s anarchists that want to abolish bedtime” jokes, and it shows in how we talk about the treatment of kids here. I think it’s part of the “bullying works” mindset, too, that always came off as “well i was beaten as a kid and it didn’t harm me” bs. Newsflash, having been bullied as kids absolutely has harmed you, it has harmed me, we constantly keep circling back to that harm and we will not be able to break that cycle and heal as long as we do not recognize that you can’t treat people like objects just because they’re 12 or “act like they’re 12”.
We need to relearn respect for human dignity and we need to start with recognizing this right in the people we most routinely deny it to, in children.
It was pointed out to me recently that the “debate” over under-18s being allowed HRT is as much a subfunction of this as it is transphobia, which I was like “woah” to but also isn’t really surprising, sadly.
Some leftists are really keen on calling people childish and weird for liking cute and wholesome stuff but have no problem with straight up gore and porn, not that they’re morally bad but you can’t expect to moralize one type of thing and not expect moralization of another thing. I have really distanced myself from the wider world when I see people praise something like Attack on Titan and call One Piece stupid. It is a microcosm of everything going on with the world, everything that is about gore, violence, death, and inhumanity/misanthropy is elevated and everything about life is degraded.
I feel like once people hit middle age they primarily consume slop again so its w/e.
Pokemon is interesting because when we were kids it was a hyper exploitative system, trying to squeeze as much money out of kids as possible. But since gamefreak is so litigious playing romhacks as an adult is almost the opposite, no monetization whatsoever.
I am autistic and my special interest is Monster High. I have gotten to the stage in life where I realise that it is just way too short and I’ve basically stopped giving a fuck if it’s seen as weird for an adult to collect dolls. I don’t want to spend my entire life suppressing one of my greatest interests just because people I don’t care about think it’s odd.
idk but the pokemon cards guys are mostly scalpers
Yeah they are but it gives anymone that likes the cards a bad name
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
Yeah you are way better at describing what I was trying to say. Haha, thanks.
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 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.
you should try local plants! i find they grow really well with no intervention and sometimes theres some fancy arrangements you can do
I have, some of them did pretty well!
hell yeah
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
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.
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.
the entire target audience of something based on aesthetics.
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.
