[frogulis]

I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.

Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?

The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.

P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.

[4thguy]

Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.

Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)

What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.

We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.

[Nition]

Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.

[4thguy]

You should watch some episodes, even if you don't watch all of it. There's a reason why it influenced popular culture (even if no one remembers it doing so).

For example "Remedial Chaos Theory" is where the term "The Darkest Timeline" comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_Chaos_Theory

[Nition]

I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.

To give an extreme example, just to make what I'm talking about obvious, this recent Instacart superbowl ad comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGTaGjqERc

Nothing about the scene or anyone in it is really connected to any reality; the whole thing is like a second-level simulation of prior media.

[4thguy]

Your observation reminds me of this book, Simulcra and Simulation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.

I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.

[Nition]

Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.

It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)

[ErroneousBosh]

> The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.

"Yeah. This is a bottle episode."