No more cape shit once you hit 30. Do some praxis instead or read a good book.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    I don’t even like superhero movies but the whole idea of “once you hit a certain age you are obligated to lead a sterile and joyless existence” never sat right with me

    Ironically, the older I get, the less I care about what I am or am not “too old” to enjoy

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      I think it comes from a place of appreciating certain media as you age that you couldn’t get into when you were younger, but now transports you to incredible places emotionally while the angsty stuff that spoke to you as a teen just doesn’t speak to you anymore. Then you see other people your numerical age who haven’t made that transition and start to wonder what it is that keeps them in arrested development. Nothing to do with sterility and joylessness.

      • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        i think rhe assumption that people will go down this linear progression in taste is flawed, given that lots of people keep the same tastes their whole life and are otherwise perfectly functional.

        i am beginning to regret the slop and treat memes. moralizing media consumption easily dips into ableism, it’s often just a way to act smug about superficial preferences instead of actually criticizing the parts of popular media that are actually bad, like the CIA propaganda or exploitation in production.

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          I’m not smug, I’m just annoyed that I have fewer people to talk with shit about because they refuse to branch out from media meant for literal children. Like how we’re all here because it’s nice to discuss socialist ideas. Having people to talk with who are on the same wavelength as you is nice. I met a guy at a wedding last month who said his hobby was watching family guy. Like what the fuck do you say to that.

          • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            i know people who literally have a special interest in barney. the fuckin’ purple dinosaur. like you can’t operate in an autistic space if you’re unable to get on with people who don’t share a show with you, so the alternative is generally learning to appreciate others enjoying shit you don’t

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              7 months ago

              I (neuroatypical) would rather you didn’t hold us up as a shield against criticism of Disney adults.

              • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                7 months ago

                Too bad, not gonna throw the many autistics that got shit for “age inappropriate” interests under the bus so people can make bad criticisms of something they find annoying.

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                7 months ago

                I (neuroatypical) would rather they do, actually, and actually have solidarity with people who are blatantly being hit with barely disguised ableism

                It’s such a small jump from “marvel special interest is reactionary” to “furries are bourgoisie decadence” that it’s deeply concerning to me

          • FearsomeJoeandmac [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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            7 months ago

            I didn’t think you were being smug at all, but there is a growing small sect of people on the left who believe that it is abelist or a bad thing to criticize the current obsession with pop media.

            Like dog, I’ll still find it an unhealthy part of capitalist and consumer culture that there are 40 year old men who do nothing but collect video games or funko pops.

            Yeah you can enjoy things, but don’t make media your entire existence.

            • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              7 months ago

              Unhealthy by what metric, and how are you defining making media your entire existence that somehow doesn’t apply to autistics?

              There’s a growing number because autistic liberation and the ND movement more generally are growing movements, and they challenge normative assumptions about things like interests. If you want to criticize mass media, you’ll have to dig deeper than a surface level digust with people being “weird” about it if you genuinley don’t want to give people shit for being weird.

              • FearsomeJoeandmac [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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                7 months ago

                Why do you think grown men getting lost In a world of toys and video games is a good thing? You arguing for consumerism media obsession really off putting to me.

                It seems almost like you’re saying only autistic people have an unhealthy obsession with pop culture.

                Sorry, it’s not ablelist to think grown people having an obsessive need to consume pop culture is a bad thing.

                I get the feeling your defending this behavior because you probably play a ton of video games or something.

                • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  Having a special interest is not exclusive to autistics, but it does get pathologized - as you’re doing here - which leads to the abusive “cures” a lot of us had to go thorugh as kids. Half of what got Chris-chan harassed and what built up Kiwifarms was their special interest in Sonic, and it’s hard to imagine that shit would have ever gotten so bad if people had simply left her the fuck alone. Whether someone is diagnosed or not, that someone might get shit for passing as autistic is a problem for autistics, I’m not going back to us being used as shorthand for people with bad politics.

                  Again, you’re not really defining what you’re meaning by “unhealthy” here, which comes across as simply moralizing. What makes what you’re arguing any different from a chud complaining about “removed” (edit: the d-word they call everything they don’t like)? You’re not even actually complaining about these people actually, materially having worse lives for really liking a specific movie or game or whatever. And you can’t even draw useful conclusions about people from it, because you’re stuck assuming I’m into Marvel or whatever when my special interest is specifically leftist politics. I don’t watch movies or play many games, and those I do play I’m overtly critical of and am varied in my tastes like a lot of NT’s - but because I am in solidarity with people who have been nearly driven to suicide over mockery for their special interest, I’m going to defend their dignity against the people who supposedly are their comrades.

                  Haven’t even fully unpacked all he gender roles you’re putting into this either - you very much are specifying “grown men” here to talk about a supposed failure to become a man, which intersects with the autistic masculine experience in a ton of fucked up ways. It’s embarassing and bad for a man to like “childish” things, but I guess it’s less cringe for women because it’s more OK for them to act “childish?” Are autistic men not men?

                  I need you to actually point to a materially bad thing, and actually connect it to whatever point you’re trying to make, 'cause otherwise it seems like you’re trying to take a comedy bit from a podcast this website has historically criticized for having dogshit takes and present it as serious politics without even having to take the effort to criticize the obvious shit like cops being presented as heroic figures or fans excusing Rowling’s transphobia. There are actual criticisms of media, like superhero movies becoming this status-quo enforcing thing that has to generate infinite sequels because that is easier for hte purposes of extracting money out of people, that aren’t about moralizing the workers that enjoy it for enjoying it.

        • FearsomeJoeandmac [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          7 months ago

          I think it’s inherently a bad thing to he obsessed with pop media and nothing else. Fanboys of corporations are a plague and should be dealt with ruthlessly.

          Nintendo fanboys, Disney adults etc.

          The only people I see who don’t like the “slop memes” are people who are usually too into pop media themselves.

          • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            And I think that is a bad take, and I base that on the frequent complaints about that take in autistic spaces. I literally haven’t seen a Marvel movie, I listen to theory as audiobooks while I’m at work, my position is based on the awful shit that gets done to autistics to “correct” this supposedly bad behavior.

            If one wanted to criticize the internalization of bad ideas in mass media, like “US are the world police and that is good” then sure, but media as a reflection of moral chatacter is some 19th century “everything has to quote Shakespeare because intellectuals read Shakespeare” shit.

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            7 months ago

            The only people I see who don’t like the “slop memes” are people who are usually too into pop media themselves.

            All of my interests are comically niche. It just rubs me the wrong way.

            This is altogether an assumption. Everyone I’ve seen criticize the meme has had literally no attachment to pop culture, and have stated so themselves.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Oh yeah, like, that sort of stuff shouldn’t be anyone’s whole existence. But some people get really aggro about it to a weird degree, as in “if you have ever enjoyed anything made for children after you turned 18 then you are a defective human being.”

  • GenXen [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    Yeah, at 30 you should be ready to graduate to all of the capeless suburban dad fantasy schlock like Reacher, the Equalizer or CIA Jim in the Clancy bullshit.

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      I feel like at this point in my life, my passion for a better world sometimes clouds reality and I feel like that can apply to all commies. I still don’t know whether “letting people enjoy things” has as much of an impact on material reality as we like to think (e.g. I don’t even think the average person looks at media like we do).

      Fuuuuuuuck if I know though

      • sharkfucker420 [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Dont get me wrong I totally understand looking at modern media these days and realizing how not only propagandized it can be but also how copy paste it is and hating it. I get looking at media through an ML lense and cringing only to then see another ML enjoying it and wondering how they don’t see it the way you do. But I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all mindless slop meant to be enjoyed as mindless slop.

        I’ve definitely fanboyed over star wars and read hours and hours and hours of lore in an obsessive frenzy knowing full well the whole time that im “wasting my time” as if all of our time needs to be spent doing something meaningful or productive. Ironically I think this feeling is rooted in capitalism. The belief that all of our time needs to be spent furthering some goal is pretty horrendous in all honesty. I like my slop and I think slop is good for us in moderation (though the slop is not moderated well in most people)

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        I think Yamcha would only have a shot if he got some powerup for Super that I don’t remember. He basically stalled out at the end of DB and didn’t see any significant increase in Z, so he’s still on World Tournament levels, which many version of Spider Man can compete with (being carried by his Danger Sense to compensate for the absurd level of speed in Dragon Ball)

        • reaper_cushions [he/him,comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          7 months ago

          Yamcha was about as strong as Radditz by the time Nappa and Vegeta showed up. Piccolo was strong enough to blow up the moon when he was at that power level. In the afterlife, he went on to train with King Kai so he probably powered up a bit after that.

          • Sephitard9001 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            I’ve read enough Dragonball and argued with enough powerscalers to know the feats are entirely meaningless and change with the wind. Like as far as Z is concerned, (ignoring Super) blowing up planets is a big deal, incomprehensible to everyone prior to the Frieza saga. When Goku meets Frieza and Frieza is mocking the Z fighters and says he could blow up the planet if he wants to, Goku turns to his friends and is like “Yeah I don’t think I can win, guys”.

            This confusion among the fan base stems from two things: Toriyama not giving a shit, and the various dubs that make up dialogue for the anime. Roshi blew up the moon with a power level of like 120 or whatever because Toriyama thought it was cool and apparently has no idea how big or far away the moon is. King Piccolo nukes 2 cities and is exhausted, and this amount of power is enough to conquer the entire Earth and mop the floor with people who are stronger than moonbuster Roshi. Nappa blows a whole in the ground and astonishes Piccolo. Recoome blows up a hill on Namek and astonishes Krillin. None of the heroes can fathom blowing away a whole planet because you’re not expected to believe everybody stronger than Roshi can pop planets like balloons using 1/4th of their power

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              7 months ago

              far as Z is concerned, (ignoring Super) blowing up planets is a big deal, incomprehensible to everyone prior to the Frieza saga.

              Didn’t Vegeta also almost blow up Earth prior?

              • Sephitard9001 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                7 months ago

                This sounds like cope but I’m pretty sure Vegeta was just pissed off. He was using his signature technique of goading his opponent into taking his attack head on because he has to charge it for so long (just like using Final Flash on Cell). I have 2 reasons to think this.

                spoiler
                1. I don’t think Vegeta is suicidal. He does not seem like the type who would easily decide to throw his life away to kill one low-class Saiyan warrior because he was humiliated. After he loses the fight and is thoroughly beaten, he opts to run away as fast as he can rather than die on Earth because his pride is still somehow unbroken. More than once we are shown that Goku and Vegeta would die if they were to remain on an exploding planet. On Namek, Goku as a Super Saiyan seems sure he will die if he doesn’t escape, and Vegeta as a Super Saiyan Blue actually does die in Revival of F when Frieza blows up Earth without attacking Vegeta directly. Only Frieza can use techniques like this because his biology allows him to survive in outer space even after losing like 70% of his flesh and organs.

                2. While I can easily accept that Vegeta COULD destroy the Earth if he tried, I believe his attack would not be capable of simply blowing the planet away with a wave of energy. I think that, like Frieza, his technique would punch through the surface of the planet to strike the core and cause a self destruction. While this is still impressive, it’s not really the same as erasing the entire planet with a single blast which I’m pretty sure we never see happening on-panel at any point before DB Super. Even Buu at the end of the manga uses an attack to destroy the Earth that is described in the same way as Frieza’s technique. It damages the inside of the planet enough to cause the planet to self destruct. And Buu’s power level being at the end of DBZ would have you believe he should be able to wholly destroy a planet with an enormous energy ball, but he doesn’t. Goku with access to Super Saiyan 3 and Vegeta with access to Super Saiyan 2 make the calculation that even combined, they cannot intercept Buu’s attack that ONLY has enough power to damage the Earth, let alone destroy a solar system like we hear Cell boast. They have to run away from an attack which only has the power to do the same thing Saiyan Saga Vegeta can apparently accomplish?

                This is why I think Dragonball characters are much, much weaker than the fanbase seems to believe they are. Despite Toriyama seemingly operating on rule of cool alone and barely cares about or understands the size of celestial bodies, he consistently demonstrates that nobody in the manga is above planet-busting power, and even then, only the most powerful of his characters are able or willing to go even that far. There is no reason whatsoever for Toriyama to hold back in the last few chapters as he has the characters use the Dragon Balls to undo all the damage caused by Buu. But still, Buu ONLY destroys the Earth with his most powerful attack. No other planet is destroyed, nor does the sun seem to be affected. Even with the damage being temporary considering the Dragon Balls, Toriyama opts to keep Buu below solar-system-busting. I don’t think this is a conscious decision. I think from Toriyama’s point of view, he didn’t write himself into a corner. He doesn’t look at his characters from the perspective of “Oh, Goku has 3 forms, they multiply his power by 50x, 2x, 4x, which means he can generate X-gigajoules and blow away Y-amount of solar systems.” Like if you read the manga or watch the movies while accepting character statements as feats, the series makes zero sense, and the if the author intended you to read character statements as feats, he could not miss how nonsense the plot is either. People handwave it away by saying “ki control” but like Buu, a creature of chaos, unleashes a mere planet-busting power ball that the two supposedly solar system busting characters can’t over power or deflect.

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  7 months ago

                  I mostly agree, I think, though I had to review the fight because, unlike DBZ powerscalers, I don’t rewatch the Saiyan and Namek Sagas every weekend.

                  One thing that really stood out to me that I don’t think I ever noted before is how much defeating Vegeta relied on collaboration, and not just a series of duels. Yeah, Yajirobi or whatever his name is cuts Vegeta’s tail, and it’s kind of cool how that happens after Gohan distracts Vegeta and then Krillin tries and fails, but the way that Goku “imparts” the Spirit Bomb to Krillin, then when Vegeta dodges it’s actually Gohan deflecting it into him that most saliently beats him, it’s way more involved than most of the later fights. idk, I just like little guys working together to beat a big guy, like I’m some kind of socialist ig.

                  Anyway, regarding the powerscaling bullshit

                  Yeah, if “planetbuster” means firing a beam of about Death Star level or greater, that immediately just reduces the whole planet to debris, I totally agree that Vegeta can’t do that. At that point, the beam clash would logically make the planet uninhabitable (because a directed explosion of equal power would be occurring right on its surface) and I think Toriyama wouldn’t pay attention to that, but would at least take the blowback a little more gravely than he does in the actual fight.

                  That said, I think Vegeta did mean it. His ship is still working and he still has the remote, since that’s how he gets away later anyway. I can promise you his thinking is essentially “Fuck it, let’s waste this asshole and blow up the planet. I don’t care about possessing Earth, I want this stain on my pride erased.” If the planet slowly collapses like we saw with Frieza, Vegeta would unquestionably have enough time to escape in his pod (assuming he actually defeated his opponents), and that’s without factoring in that he seemed pretty confident in his psychological profiling of Goku and surely knew that letting the Earth die was not something Goku would view as an option in that scenario, meaning he didn’t think the full force of the blast had even a chance of hitting the Earth anyway.

                  He isn’t suicidal, but with a semi-coherent plan like I’ve mentioned and an absolutely seething level of rage, he is very likely to do something without thinking through all the caveats and confounding variables. That’s sort of a major part of his character and gets him nearly killed multiple times with Zarbon, the Android twins, and Cell, and some version of that hastiness literally does kill him against Buu. The Saiyan Saga is Vegeta at his most shallow and unreasonable – as made obvious by him killing Nappa just because – so him making a ramshackle plan that is likely to kill him even if he got relatively lucky because he didn’t think it through properly is perfectly in character. In fact, we could consider the Saiyan Saga another instance of almost getting killed along the same lines because, if he had just not killed Nappa he probably would have won, since even an injured Nappa could fight the small fries well enough and also become a Great Ape. If Goku’s fading consciousness failed and he wasn’t able to notice Krillin at the end, Vegeta would have probably died right there from being stabbed in the back.

                  Hell, if he had just not been such an asshole and done things like threaten to destroy the planet out of spite, he might have had a chance of at least stalling Krillin enough to find some method of escape (like resting enough to bat Krillin away just a single time and then flying out of there.

                  Anyway yeah, the manga is written semi-incoherently from the standpoint of feats or even just a little bit of scrutiny. Super is the worst fucking thing, though not for the reasons people complain about. In one of the last few chapters, someone tosses a Senzu Bean to Gohan, he fumbles it, and the bean falls in a crack in the Earth, and everyone is just like “that’s gone now”. These fuckers literally move so much faster than sight that it’s condescending to even say that! There is nothing in the world that can convince me that Gohan could not have recovered the bean before it hit the ground, bounced, and fell into the fissure, to say nothing of the fact that it should still be totally possible to retrieve from the ground anyway. Like, nevermind what dumbass powerscalers say about faster-than-light speech during the Frieza Saga, the base manga even without the weird pseudoscience “calculating” falls apart so quickly if you look even a little closely at it as far as consistency goes.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            Yeah, he did a bit of training because what else does he do besides chase tail and play baseball, but I don’t think he was ever shown to make substantial progress, i.e. he didn’t gain any new feats or even concrete statements by other characters testifying to being at least as strong as X.

            I’m not convinced he could blow up the moon during the Saiyan Saga, but he surely can by Super just through sheer inflation. There is also the increasing aspect of the writers saying “fuck it” and giving characters power-ups that make literally no sense, with the recent Gohan one being the most absurdly egregious offender, so I’m sure that Yamcha could get to one-shotting-planets and well beyond in a single evening if it was more convenient for the plot (it just never will be because Yamcha is irrelevant), or just wish for it on the Dragon Balls and thereby get stronger than Golden Frieza, which apparently is a thing people can just do if the Dragon likes you enough to not have your wish kill you.

      • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Everyone likes to bring up the time Spider-Man beat Firelord (one of Galactus’ heralds, on par with the Silver Surfer), but everyone always forgets the time he got beat up by Turner D. Century, the man who thought the world peaked in 1908

          • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            And because he was Boomer Thanos, it didn’t work

            Then he was killed by the Scourge of the Underworld

            Then he was cloned by Nazi Scientist Arnim Zola

            Then he was killed by Deadpool

            Then he was brought back to life by The Hood to kill the Punisher

            Now the Punisher became a ninja, got divorced, his ex-wife stole all his money and he’s moved to Weirdworld to fight monsters and now there’s a slightly different guy who’s wearing a slightly different skull and uses lasers instead of bullets

            comic books, folks!

        • Sephitard9001 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          Spiderman going through a comic arc and losing a fight is much too kind to Peter for Marvel writers. Before his inevitable death, you know the author would include a scene where Buu uses Parker Clan Extinction Attack and simultaneously snipes everyone Peter has ever cared about in the entire world with dozens of energy beams

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        It’s so weiiiiird he’s an artificial being he doesn’t need nipples. It’s one of the things that stands out in the character design in the show because the Saiyans all have nips but all Buu’s transformations don’t. He’s always been a pretty well design character.

        Anyway you joke about “Majin Booba” but uhhh Majin Buu’s official wife is a female spawn he created and named Booby after finding Mr Satan’s porno collection. The entire Majin race descends from them because they then fucked like rabbits. I am not joking. This is the canon explanation between Dragonball Online and Dragonball Xenoverse.

        • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          You call it canon but that’s a dumb spinoff thing made up for silly video games. Canon is generally considered to be stuff made up by Toriyama, which even tentatively includes the ridiculous oversexualized Majin Booba character Android 21, but I’ve never heard of anyone who takes Dragon Ball Online lore seriously lol

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            Canon is generally considered to be stuff made up by Toriyama,

            I’m sorry to curse you with this knowledge but Toriyama wrote Dragonball Online.

            • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              Toei Animation keeps Toriyama chained up in a basement somewhere and they already have several clones of him growing for when he kicks the bucket.

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                They’ll need those clones because the fanbase basically treats “written by Toriyama” as the “this is canon” rule. When he’s gone the entire universe will shatter into pieces if it comes from different authors and everyone will endlessly argue over what’s real or not forever.

            • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              Huh, yeah that’s a new one to me. Since even the most committed dragon ball nerds have no interest in including any of that lore.

              I’ve actually played that game so that should tell you what kind of fucking nerd you’re dealing with lmao

  • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    We can trace this down to antiquity. All the old stories of gods and heroes were cape shit. Achilles is just a Mary sue self insert OC. Just was that back in the day, like dioginese cranking his hog in the market square, people made their own. Now people have been so alienated they can’t make their own anymore. The only revolutionary force powerful enough to fix this is Ao3.

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      This is such a culturally illiterate comparison that it’s hard to say where to start, aside from that Achilles, while “overpowered” is clearly not a Mary Sue. He was wildly unstable and occasionally blasphemous to the point that when he spent days dragging Hector’s corpse to desecrate it, the gods intervened to preserve it.

      People do make their own myths, probably the clearest example (awful as it is) is Roko’s Basilisk. These designed-by-commitee entertainment products do not have the social origin of myths, nor really any of the functions of them.

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        7 months ago

        I have seen too many super man tattoos to belive that. In at least some real way those are our modern myths.

        We are just now getting some back with creepy pasta. Like slenderman, the backrooms, skibbidy might go that way.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          7 months ago

          You would need to do more to distinguish myth from symbolism in general. I agree that the internet things you talk about (not sure about the last one and frankly I don’t really want to know) are a type of folk tradition, but we should likewise recognize that a corporate Slenderman movie is not the same thing as the folk tradition of Slenderman.

          The fundamental problem with capeshit movies even compared to comics is that it’s so overwhelmingly corporate, it’s entirely centralized and top-down in terms of who is telling the story, rather than emerging from grassroots storytelling like even to some small extent comics historically have (both from the many conflicting stories from countless authors, major and minor, and the fact that it’s much more viable to just be some dude and make a comic than it is to be some dude and make a capeshit movie).

          People don’t necessarily need to literally believe it for it to be a myth, but part of the central point of them that separates them from a more general type of fiction is that they are made to explain things in a way that at least resonates with people and how they relate to the world. Power fantasies, flashy effects, and obtuse “mysteries” in the “lore” are overwhelmingly what is in capeshit and these do not contribute to what myths are (though they can be present, well at least the first two). Capeshit movies are generally too up their own ass in realities totally divorced from ours that don’t even incidentally intersect with human experience beyond the most generic tropes.

          If that garbage Wandavision series wasn’t such an ARG, I’d say that it is one of the closer examples in how it (poorly attempts to) connect with people and had some success.

          As an aside, another reason I dislike the comparison is that there’s a need to have an eternal status quo that myths generally don’t. Yes, a good portion of the gods never die in any story, but the humans sure as hell do, because they aren’t some Neverending Story to be milked forever with sequels. The stories of Achilles live on and get reinterpreted and people sometimes place him in silly new situations, but it’s a fundamental part of his character that Paris shoots him in the heel and he fucking dies and, from then on, exists only as a shade in the afterlife along with all of the other Heroes in Greek mythology other than Hercules (depending on the version).

          Remember, the Heroic Age ended when Telegonus killed Odysseus, the last great Hero, with a poison spear. What followed was the Iron Age, which was the Age identified as being the “modern day” when Homer was around.

          Now compare that to Bane iconically “breaking the bat” and now, from DC, what we get are habitual rehashings of the same anemic gestures emulating that moment as Batman lives forever in his time-agnostic sequels like an edgy Ash Ketchum.

          • bananon [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            7 months ago

            (not sure about the last one and frankly I don’t really want to know)

            You can’t truly understand until you see Skibbidy Toilet