| One kind of intriguing thing when it comes to the near obsessive degree at which "the younger generation" (it's really mostly just a really loud subsection) is linking "buying merchandise" to "having a personality/showing you are a good person" is that they've basically managed to start calling for a recreation of the Hays Code. For anyone who didn't know, the Hays Code is the reason why so many old Hollywood movies had these overly stiff, Dudley Do-Good vision of the world. It was a moral code that was written to be as inoffensive as possible to the lowest common denominator. You couldn't depict something morally wrong without there being some kind of punishment for the wrongdoer, that sorta thing. Sounds not bad on paper, until you remember that this was written in 1920 and sensibilities of the time meant that things like gay people would have to be punished for being gay, or that you couldn't put a black person in the same sort of starring role a white person would get, because that could upset people who'd never seen a black dude before. It got scrapped in the 1960s (due to the European movie scene having no such restrictions and they wound up basically crushing Hollywoods output for 6 years straight) but was softly derided by movie makers in the decade before that. Up until very recently, an informal version of the Hays Code still existed for syndicated childrens entertainment (if you ever wondered why villains in 90s saturday morning cartoons often ended up being more interesting than the heroes this is why; writers had less limitations writing them compared to the heroes who had to always be morally righteous and upstanding as long as they did a token punishment for the bad behavior at the end. Skeletor and He-Man are probably the archetypical example of that), but that kinda just fizzled out around the turn of the 2000s. The problem with the modern situation comes in when you grapple with the fact that both people and stories are these complex things with lots of different emotions and that nobody is going to be a perfect human. Yet this younger generation wants to have this "perfect" vision in their media because they paid for it. They've been taught "you financially support something you morally agree with", and if something as a result does something they disagree with, it's easier to demand the work to be changed (or vilified) rather than think critically about why they're upset and think about what the author wants them to think about such things. It's how you get things like "villainous character does morally reprehensible thing, clearly the author must support doing this morally reprehensible thing" being brought up as arguments. I don't think it's something to be too concerned about (teenagers believe so much stupid shit, reality will flush most of it out with time), but it's definitely concerning to see this stuff morph into a second call for the Hays Code. |