[gabriel666smith]

> It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU

I disagree - I don’t think the MCU and its ilk are satiating enough intellectually if you’re a person who has latent capability for a certain level of contribution.

You’d hope they’d intuit that they were missing something important, and discover - for example - Alan Moore, and continue from there toward slightly more nutritious content, as I suspect most people in this thread did.

But that opinion - though one I hold very strongly - is an opinion I hold because I find that it’s much more beneficial to believe that culture you do not aspire to cannot satiate you. Kind of Pascal’s Wager, but for baby movies. The placebo effect is very strong.

> lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise

What a heartbreaking image! You’d hope they would be thinking about - for example - their loved ones, or at least reflecting on how they had a lot of fun.