This reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote “ When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
This also reminds me of finding boxes full of superhero comic books from the 1950s and 1960s in my grandparent’s basement. They had belonged to my father and his siblings when they were teenagers. I loved reading those old comic books where every story had a complete story between two covers. Where it was always clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were (and if the good guy was acting bad, you knew that by the end of the story it would be revealed that they were pretending or being controlled by a bad guy). The stories were plain fun and uplifting. Such a joy to read. Decades later I tried getting into the modern comic books. I was disappointed by them. They were all serial stories that required reading multiple volumes to get the whole story. The themes were ones of depression, cynicism, bleakness, sadness, hurt, pain. I simply couldn’t relate and yearned for the comics of my youth in my grandparent’s basement. But, I still really enjoy the marvel movies ;-)
I can relate to that quote (as I'm sure most people can).
When I was in middle-school, Pokemon TCG was still really new and popular ... "with children". Me and my friends played together, but I was horrified of the idea of anyone else at school finding out. I remember walking to a friends house with my cards and ran into some of our school friends walking the other way, and I did everything I could to hide my box so they didn't ask what I was carrying.
What a childish thing to do ;P
Now that I'm older, I hang my most prized Pokemon cards behind me like a poster. I don't care if my webcam picks them up during work. And I love to tell people about it.
I make sure to never show shame around my kids about "little kid things". Or even "girly" things or "boy-ee" things. When my son started to show shame for liking "pink" things, I slowly started including pink and purple as my favorite colors when my kids asked. I gently yet swiftly squash any "barbies are for girls" type of comments when they're spoken around me.
Sometimes I'll walk in on my young teen son shamelessly playing Barbies or other dolls with his little sister. I say nothing except things like, "Looks like you're having fun!" It makes me sad to think of the day when the wrong friend finds out and teases him for it. Hopefully by then he's gained enough self-esteem to not listen.
>>Where it was always clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were
As I get older, and the world gets more chaotic, I find I like this more and more.. When you have to vet the weatherman saying it's raining, its nice to have something simple/straightforward.
As a kid, I always had a softspot for 80s spiderman - nothing ever went right for the poor guy :-P
I remember the days when a superhero would fight an army of bad guys, against overwhelming odds, and win. Now it's an army of superheros (Avengers as an example) against one bad guy and their win is often ambiguous. It just doesn't have the same payoff for the time spent consuming the entertainment.
It's the infantilization of the newer generations of adults. We are now kids until we are in our forties, still playing with Lego and Star Wars and hankering for the next Marvel episode. In the process, as the article points out, we have co-opted these categories and imbued them with a discordant set of adult sensibilities which makes them wholly unappealing and inappropriate for actual kids. Not even My Little Pony is safe.
Some will probably argue that it's wonderful, finally we allow ourselves to let the inner child blossom and bloom into adulthood. It just seems to me that it is the worst parts of the inner child that we indulge: Escapist, shirking responsibility, partial to instant gratification rather than deeper pursuits. I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.
Mozart also produced a lot of rubbish low brow humor, Shakespeare is full of cheap dirty jokes.
What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality. The truth is that superhero movies are the latest incarnation of a type of entertainment which is as old as the oldest human culture we know about. The Iliad is the same kind of entertainment in a different format. Commentators said the same about gladiators chariot races in the Colosseum. There are dick jokes scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.
The childish attitude is making a dichotomy between childish and adult things and criticizing the childish things pretending the latest incarnation is somehow a new kind of thing.
Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.
The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."
You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.
Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.
Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.
>"What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality."
I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.
It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).
I listen to a lot of high brow and low brow humor. I probably hear 20 fart and dick jokes in a given week. I'm not against or above it.
That has nothing to do with infantilization in our culture. The fact that they also had fart and dick jokes in the past has no bearing on this.
The fact that adults in our culture form their identity around low quality super hero movies in a desperate attempt to recapture their youth and seem fun and then run off to buy the little toys from the ads is the infantilization.
> Mozart also produced a lot of rubbish low brow humor, Shakespeare is full of cheap dirty jokes.
I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.
Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.
They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.
They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.
Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.
Fantasy sports is perfectly acceptable as an adult hobby. So is reality TV. Or gambling/playing the lottery. Or just getting drunk every weekend till all sense of reality is warped. All of these (and lots more) are perfect examples of escapism. But as soon as we start talking about superheroes or sci-fi suddenly it becomes "infantilization" because those are associated with nerds. There's no deeper logic here than decades worth of social stigma.
Almost all of the things you listed as acceptable hobbies are looked down upon at least in my social circle and I'd argue in general. Reality TV is a guilty pleasure even among fans, gambling and drinking are clearly vices, fantasy sports can involve gambling and even if it doesn't it's seen as a pretty nerdy thing to be into.
The only hobbies that aren't looked down upon are things that involve creation instead of consumption or are major class signifiers really (Opera, skiing, etc).
> suddenly it becomes "infantilization" because those are associated with nerds
I think you may be on to something. Perhaps it's because it feels worse when it is highly intelligent and otherwise reasonable people wasting their time.
> There's no deeper logic here than decades worth of social stigma.
Oh, there is. There's a whole school of thought that is basically non-stop hand-wringing about how superheroes are displacing religion, and We Must Take Back Our Media from those Hollywood heathens and so on.
Stupid, yes. But dangerous too - book-burning season looks like it is just getting started, they already are going after Disney, and those people seem geared up for a serious push.
I remember comics in the 1980's and they weren't pure escapist fantasy written for children. They tackled very adult subjects like reparations and slavery through the Genotia series in the X-Men and how the mutants were the stand-ins for the African Americans, where Genotia (a fictitious nation) enslaved them and America stripped their rights away, using the force of the Sentinels to do so. I was maybe 12 during this story line and it was foundational on how I treat and view people.
Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).
Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(
Yes, everything the author describes started in earnest with 80s comics.
The trouble is that after Moore completely deconstructed super hero comics with Watchmen (and Miracle Man, and Miller with Dark Knight, etc.), a new generation thought that's how comics were supposed to be.
But Moore demonstrated that if you extrapolate how super humans would operate in "the real world", it would quickly devolve into a nightmare no one would want to live in.
So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless. Watchmen did it better than any of the current authors, and reading them just leads to getting depressed about the depravity of our fantasy worlds, on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.
I will agree there were some comics that talked about social issues, but even those tended to not hit you on the head with the message so hard, and they weren't the majority of comics books - they were a small minority of books. Now everyone wants to be Alan Moore, or they don't understand why Alan Moore is important and they want to dress their heroes up for party instead of make interesting stories with cool action.
Comics are alive and well in non-western comic traditions. It's the big two (Marvel,DC) as well some some smaller companies like IDW that can't produce stories people want to read on a regular basis.
The easy explanation for this is that adults, with the disposable income that they never had as children, are good consumers of products they couldn’t previously afford. Nostalgia sells.
You bemoan the consumption of video games and superhero fiction as low value content. And you don’t blame their formats, but their content. But is that right? Past generations were dominated by all sorts of cheap, disposable entertainment- soap operas, radio shows, pulp fiction. What do yearly superhero films resemble? The serial films that arrived at the beginning of cinema. Is this base content really so much baser than the entertainment of the past?
Ugh, please, attitudes like yours is the infantile one. Enjoying Lego and Star Wars isn't in opposition to being a good adult. Especially being a good parent. Creativity and imagination are hugely important in the modern world, and those endeavors require a playful mindset to excel at. It's sad to me to see that you find other's enjoyment as "sad". But I'm sure you have "proper" grown man pursuits, why don't you share with us what I, as a 50+ year old man should spend my time on? It might be shocking, but I spend my time on whatever it is you think I should be doing as well.
Here's an idea: being an adult shouldn't be one dimensional. I can play with legos, play video games, read scifi and fantasy, and also raise my son, renovate my house, and, I dunno, wrestle bears? Conquer nations? Drink beer and yell at the TV about sports? Or maybe it is denigration of others that you think is the hobby real men do. If so, you're correct, I'm just a child then with my silly belief that people getting joy from activities is a good thing.
Also, there's plenty for kids to get into these days, including comics, books, video games, and whatever. More than I had when I was a kid.
My dad's favourite hobby was tinkering on cars. I don't honestly see much difference between me playing video games and tinkering on my PC than him driving and getting his hands greasy. My grandfather's was walking around in the woods hunting or sitting in a boat fishing. Why are those mature and virtuous, while my love of games infantilizing? Are video games innately childish due to their medium? Is a comic book movie actually that much more childish than Die Hard or James Bond?
I don’t know about virtuous but the clear difference is fishing and fixing cars produces useful byproducts: food & working transportation. Playing with the PC may do that but usually video games do not unless you are making them yourself.
I'm sure others will disagree but I believe playing video games for hours is more infantilizing than hunting, fishing, or tinkering on cars.
The former is content designed by humans (generally working under the aegis of giant corporations) whose goal is to completely capture and dominate your attention to the exclusion of other things. While videogames certainly can be and often are art that tells interesting stories about the human condition, they also often function psychologically much more like junk food and drugs. They give you just enough serotonin hit to get you to keep playing but rarely enough to leave you truly sated. Many games don't want to satisfy because then you'll stop consuming the content.
Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally. They are both boring in a deeply useful way that gives you time to reflect and process your own thoughts. Instead of doom scrolling social media which constantly fills your brain with new information, stressors, and problems that you never have time to sift through, hunting and fishing give your brain the idle time it needs to finally start defragging its memory.
Tinkering on cars forces you to solve difficult challenges. Unlike playing videogames where the stakes are by design relatively low—all you can lose is time—working on a car forces you to confront difficulty and failure where that matters. You can break parts that are expensive to replace. You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.
All three of these engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands in an integrated, much deeper way than a controller and rectangle of pixels does. The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.
This is something we all know intuitively and it's the constant onslaught of capitalism and the ease of consuming media at home that makes us forget. Videogames can certainly have moments of meaningful joy. But ask yourself this: How often after sinking an hour into a game do you find yourself thinking, "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?
For me, 80% of the time I spend playing videogames or watching dumb social media leaves me with the same lingering regret I feel when I eat a bag of chips instead of preparing an actually nutritious meal.
There is a fair amount of good content, in both video games and comic books. Both are fairly reasonably considered art. I don't see a lot of people saying we should destroy art museums because they're escapism.
Yes, there's a lot of bad video games and comic books, too. But I dare say exactly that is true of arts, books, and a variety of other things people widely consider worthwhile forms of entertainment.
The real problem with rampant neoteny isn't adults playing video games, it's the very revulsion at the idea (and I hate this phrase) of "adulting".
The entire point of the transition from childhood to adulthood is that you become responsible for yourself and others which is a transition from you being the responsibility of others.
The idea that responsibilities are somehow an injustice has dominated thinking of my generation and latter. I really enjoy playing a round of Elden Ring after I've gotten all my house work done and taken care of the things that people rely on me for. Just on the basic standards of household maintenance I'm shocked how often my friends apartments look like they are lived in by a teenager.
The whole idea of "ghosting" is another example of this bizarre inability to just do the things you need to do. Being an "adult" in just about any culture, means you do somethings that are uncomfortable because those things need to be done. Sure it can be hard to tell some people "no" but ignoring them completely because you can't stand a bit of discomfort is the very essence of "childish" behavior.
I grew up in a dysfunctional household, where I was not taken care of as a child, so I was very eager to become an adult. Taking responsibility and taking care of myself where things I looked forward to because I'd be taken care of, even if I was the one doing it.
Now that climate change is starting to show undeniable consequences it's a bit hard for me to take demands for climate action seriously from people who just a few months ago complained about "adulting" when doing their own taxes in their late 20s.
Did you just say "a round" of Elden Ring?....now I have a suspicion that I'm replying to a bot haha.
What if I told you I ghost people because I don't care and it has nothing to do with maturity.
I experience 0 discomfort cutting ties and relationships with people that I've moved on from or didn't see myself interacting with in the first place. I find no grace in extending interactions to make some people feel better that feel like they're owed conversation or an explanation. What's so wrong with just moving on? If someone doesn't gel with you or reply, you should really just take the hint. Or would it be better for me to be honest and say something like, "Sorry, I just find you intolerable once I got to know you, so I think it's better if you don't talk to me anymore, thank you!"
I think it's childish to expect everyone to give you the time of day in a world where we are busier than ever before. I'd prefer to be ghosted by people who decide to ghost me.
Most people complain about "adulting" do it in jest or use it as a device to insult the job their parents did of teaching them important skills. I raised myself and I never complain about "adulting" but find it fun to groan about becoming older.
> the infantilization of the newer generations of adults
I think when you reach the age of like 25, you realize that you don't have a clue, and the "adults" around you mostly don't have a clue either.
But it's always been like that. It is in fact a childish view to conceive of adulthood as some fundamentally different stage of life where everything changes and you've got it all figured out.
The real difference with past generations is that you were expected and able to slot into a rigid social order, to fill a certain role. That rigidity has partly been rejected, and is partly simply out of reach due to economic factors.
it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books
high quality comics targeted at adults have existed in europe for decades. there was no infantilization there. and the fact that i enjoy playing videogames occasionally allows me to spend quality time with my children in ways that my parents never could.
I know a few people who spend hours doing intensive work a day (PhD program for one, medical school for another), and don't want to become involved in more intensive hobbies (e.g. literature study, art films). The deeper pursuits are left for the career, and hobbies are an easy way to get your mind off it during rest periods.
This should be the top comment for the GP. To a very good approximation all pursuits of all adults are fundamentally rubbish in a childish level. Just as an example, I think it is widely accepted that following sports is a decent way for a proper adult to spend their time. Like...what? Seriously, you call e.g. watching other people driving in circles competing who is fastest as a serious, non-rubbish adult-like way to spend time? (Okay, I agree, it may be fun. But so are all the other pursuits to whoever pursue them, so no difference there.)
Star Wars is hardly the first time adults have enjoyed a pastime that isn't a "deeper pursuit" or sufficiently thought provoking. Heck, "America's pastime" is a game of people hitting a ball with a stick, and has drawn millions of viewers.
If you had a time machine and went back a couple thousand years, I think you'd find that people already did unproductive things for entertainment.
And people have probably been disapproving of younger generations enjoying the wrong entertainment for about as long as we've done things for entertainment.
Not really sure how it's infantilization. Do super powers make a movie more infantile than not having them? Does it change the moral challenges and difficulties encountered? Is an action movie or heist movie better or more mature without such things? Are sitcoms and reality TV somehow less rubbish? Perhaps people should only spend their time reading and discussing serious philosophers and political policy.
I have a liking for the current crop of superhero stuff because its light-hearted. The tone is hopeful. (It's ironic, honestly, that the article goes on about the mature/miserable nature of current superhero stuff when the flagship Marvel stuff is all pretty positive, with the exception of the ten-year culmination of the Avengers storyline they cite). It's a nice break from worrying about the real world, which these days seems to have this constant, vague, oppressive feeling of inevitable doom. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but the universal problems around corruption, collective action issues, personal wealth above general good, etc. is tiring and depressing.)
I don't think maturity is a function of one's hobbies, and I believe that to do so is to use a poison-the-well fallacy, where the poison is the emphasis on the association of the hobby with children as a means to argue that there exists a common component (=immaturity) shared between the two classes of people that has a causal relationship with the hobby in question.
Maturity is, in my opinion, a function of one's perception of the consequences of their actions and how they weigh said consequences. An immature person, regardless of their hobbies behaves like a child when they don't consider e.g. the feelings of other people or the harm they impose onto others. As we get older and accumulate more experiences through interactions with other people, we tend to take into consideration a far longer and wider horizon. This usually happens by increasing one's responsibilities as they become older.
bravo sir! It is only the opera and the delicate art of croquet that hold any moral character. The rest of these ragamuffins are filling their heads with nonsense like philistines instead of reading through the classics 24/7 like anyone sensible would.
> I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.
So you think they should move on to an "adult" hobby like stamp collecting or model trains?
This comment is funny.
The article complains that comics are not for kids anymore because they treat adult themes.
This comment complains that adults are somehow children because they engage with entertainment formats that were traditionally geared towards children.
I agree that adults engage in all manner of pointless, infantilizing ways to waste their time.
The only enormous time and energy sink I’ve seen that’s completely universal and worse than marvel movies or funko pops is Posting — random grown adults online that have been told that their opinions should hold sway over other random adults online because of the sheer value of their opinions. For every sad weirdo with a room full of expensive anime figurines, there are hundreds of sad, weird Facebook Aunts espousing “the importance of traditional values and maybe urine therapy”
It’s like we’ve all got a new commonality. It used to be eating, shitting, pissing, fucking and sleeping. Now it’s that plus “screaming into an uncaring void”
Something I heard once that has always stuck with me: "They can take everything from you except your contempt."
The idea is when so much of our agency is stripped from us, often the last thing we can hold onto—which we hold onto tightly because it is the last thing—is comtempt. You can crush me under your boot. You can make me sing the party's songs. But you can't make me believe them. You may own my body but not my mind.
We in the US are living in a time of deep cynicism and distrust of all of the institutions Americans used to hold dear. The degree to which that distrust is misplaced is an open question but the distrust itself is unequivocal.
I look at the current culture of anti-heroes and dark superheroes as a reaction to that. We are so distrustful of anyone or thing claiming to be good that a brightly-colored positive superhero today would earn only contempt from us. We'd assume it must be a deceitful facade.
All that leaves us is morally corrupted dark anti-heroes that are least openly flawed and whose contempt for the other institutions of justice mirrors our own.
>All that leaves us is morally corrupted dark anti-heroes that are least openly flawed and whose contempt for the other institutions of justice mirrors our own.
Except most modern superhero movies aren't like that at all, if anything much of the genre seems to be a tonal rejection of the cynicism and nihilism you're describing.
I took my son to see the first Iron Man movie when he was around that same age (maybe a little younger). He's 18 now, and has yet to become a burned-out, drug-addicted misanthropic serial killer. Maybe, just maybe, you're being a little unreasonably overprotective.
All these referenced movies are rated PG-13. No rating system is perfect, but I think there's at least a very reasonable case to be made that they're not age appropriate for 7 year olds
PG-13 has a wide enough range these days to be entirely meaningless. There is no harm in taking a 7-10 year old to see an Avengers film, IMO, but of course I wouldn't say the same for the Dark Knight trilogy.
> I think there's at least a very reasonable case to be made that they're not age appropriate for 7 year olds
What is the case? What is the bad outcome that happens to a 7 year old who watches a PG-13 movie? (Or more generally, a population of 7 year olds who watch PG-13 movies)
Like, what’s the bad “thing” that we should be able to see?
People are exposed to all kinds of things when they are kids and they grow up just fine. I've scarcely met anyone who felt that _they themselves_ were negatively affected by or unable to deal with something in a popular TV show they wanted to see as a child--but then they have kids and go into this weird neurotic state of hyper-vigilance.
I was thinking about something similar recently: I was raised in a very christian household, and while I've lost faith in divinity, I still look back fondly at being raised that way and believe it did instill valuable life lessons that just don't require the existence of a god to be valuable. Having said all that, I've been finding myself a bit uncomfortable with religious books and stories and such which our families share with our own young children. The kids seem so impressionable and religious stuff seems like such overt brainwashing from my non-believing adult perspective. But these two instincts are in conflict! My children will inevitably be less influenced by this than I was (we aren't going to church and Sunday school every week...), and those years of constant exposure didn't keep me from developing my own views and opinions when I grew up. So my conclusion is that maybe I don't need to worry so much about my kids being impressionable now because they aren't going to get stuck, they're going to keep taking in and incorporating different influences for decades, maybe what I need to do instead is work hard at answering their questions in a way that keeps them curious and gives them room to grow.
I was pretty scarred by the first Saw movie, even though I only made it about halfway through the first torture scene. I don't understand why people want to subject themselves to that kind of psychological violence.
I was never into comics as a kid, but started reading some after a podcaster I like sold me on how good they can be. I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, and started reading the older comics (from the 40s, 50s, and 60s)
They are a lot of fun once you understand the art form, but there are a lot of problematic things with them, just like any work from 80 years ago.
I got into reading some of them with my 5 year old daughter, and she loves the old ones. I sometimes have to explain some things to her, and why some things we read aren’t ok, but she likes them.
We also found quite a few more modern comics that are perfect for kids her age. We love reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur together, and we also love reading Squirrel Girl comics. We stay away from some of the more dark comics that feature the most popular super heroes.
I guess my point is that there are a lot more super hero comics than just the MCU ones, and some are much more kid appropriate than others. I appreciate a world that has adult and kid comics. Why can’t we have both?
One other thing I noticed with my two kids (6 and 3 now) is that what scares and traumatizes them the most aren’t the things that scare adult me the most. For example, I am way more disturbed by death than my kids. Characters dying don’t bother my kids like it does me. I think it is likely due to not really understanding what death is, exactly. They have not lost people and don’t understand the permanence.
On the other hand, random things that don’t seem scary at all can scare the crap out of them. My 3 year old will want to watch the fight to the death between sharptooth and little foot’s mom in Land Before Time over and over, but freaks out over the opening montage in Moana.
I think this might be the best moment on HN, to talk about my my love of 'One Piece'. The highest selling comic-book by a single author of all time.
The joy of exploration, 'cool' moments, downright insane attacks, friendship and slapstick humor appealed to 10 yr old me. 20 years from then, it is still the best work of fantasy fiction I have ever read. Oda has managed to preserve all of those moments of childlike joy and unbridled creativity, while injecting societally relevant themes of authoritarianism, discrimination, the complex nature of morality and art that moves the genre forward, in a manner that is superior to a lot of grim-dark works meant to do exactly that. The current arc exemplifies that quality, 25 years since it started.
Calling a manga with 500 million sales underrated is ridiculous, but I find that it is still not appreciated enough in American & 'critic' spaces.
Here in the US, it is common to ignore manga because of the stereotypes that come with certain genres within it. However, I find that Japan's best artists & story-tellers find manga as their medium for expression more often than western counterparts.
I find that American culture tends to invade American media in a way that demands attention until the next 'big' issue is identified. Every community is forced to comment on the one issue, in a manner that kills all diversity and 'magic' from creative works. It feels lazy and repetitive. To some degree, it might do some good for American culture and American media to reorient towards more localized concerns, and not care so much about what is ruling the 1st-page of the new cycle.
If the author thinks Avengers is too dark for their son, they definitely won't like One Piece. The manga has a man eating his own leg from starvation, a man getting half his head blown off, genocide, human experimentation, people being sold for slavery, a man being boiled alive. I love One Piece, but if the author wants their son to be free of "stunted impersonation of grownup sensibilities" I'm not sure it's the right thing.
I'm more than old enough to have a 13-year old offspring without any age-of-consent laws being broken¹, and I distinctly remember there been dark tones in comic books and² related cartoons back in my youth. It isn't a new thing.
I suspect that either there is some selective memory going on here, or the writer's parents were very careful about what parts of the comics world they were exposed to.
[1] old enough to have a 26-year-old one even
[2] though much less so as the grimier ones didn't get the TV treatment, or the grime was mostly washed off
Yes, the transition is really an 80's-90's thing. A lot of films are basically using comics from that era as storyboards. The few superhero films of that era were generally lightweight fare based on much older comics.
Those comics were visually dark and had some darkish themes but they weren't much darker than Power Rangers or anything else on at the time. If anything they were more sophisticated shows than Power Rangers.
That's not to say Power Rangers was bad, but Spider-Man and Gargoyles were interesting in that they used multi-episode storylines with multiple acts. Outside of their visual motifs they weren't dark series. They were just offering narratives for older kids that were reading books and comics and playing video games.
This was a great article. This is probably one of the reasons why my son only reads comics that are about Minecraft characters. Why would he want to read superheroes? That is grownup stuff. The Minecraft comics are often odd, have to weirdly combine school age kid concerns with crafting things and wearing pumpkins on your head to hide from endermen, but nobody is nihilistically killing everyone.
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This also reminds me of finding boxes full of superhero comic books from the 1950s and 1960s in my grandparent’s basement. They had belonged to my father and his siblings when they were teenagers. I loved reading those old comic books where every story had a complete story between two covers. Where it was always clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were (and if the good guy was acting bad, you knew that by the end of the story it would be revealed that they were pretending or being controlled by a bad guy). The stories were plain fun and uplifting. Such a joy to read. Decades later I tried getting into the modern comic books. I was disappointed by them. They were all serial stories that required reading multiple volumes to get the whole story. The themes were ones of depression, cynicism, bleakness, sadness, hurt, pain. I simply couldn’t relate and yearned for the comics of my youth in my grandparent’s basement. But, I still really enjoy the marvel movies ;-)
When I was in middle-school, Pokemon TCG was still really new and popular ... "with children". Me and my friends played together, but I was horrified of the idea of anyone else at school finding out. I remember walking to a friends house with my cards and ran into some of our school friends walking the other way, and I did everything I could to hide my box so they didn't ask what I was carrying.
What a childish thing to do ;P
Now that I'm older, I hang my most prized Pokemon cards behind me like a poster. I don't care if my webcam picks them up during work. And I love to tell people about it.
I make sure to never show shame around my kids about "little kid things". Or even "girly" things or "boy-ee" things. When my son started to show shame for liking "pink" things, I slowly started including pink and purple as my favorite colors when my kids asked. I gently yet swiftly squash any "barbies are for girls" type of comments when they're spoken around me.
Sometimes I'll walk in on my young teen son shamelessly playing Barbies or other dolls with his little sister. I say nothing except things like, "Looks like you're having fun!" It makes me sad to think of the day when the wrong friend finds out and teases him for it. Hopefully by then he's gained enough self-esteem to not listen.
As I get older, and the world gets more chaotic, I find I like this more and more.. When you have to vet the weatherman saying it's raining, its nice to have something simple/straightforward.
As a kid, I always had a softspot for 80s spiderman - nothing ever went right for the poor guy :-P
Some will probably argue that it's wonderful, finally we allow ourselves to let the inner child blossom and bloom into adulthood. It just seems to me that it is the worst parts of the inner child that we indulge: Escapist, shirking responsibility, partial to instant gratification rather than deeper pursuits. I know it's a value judgement, it's just sad to me to see grown men spend all their time on video games and comic books - not because of the formats themselves but because the content is usually rubbish. Cultural junk food.
What you have is a value judgement of the golden age conservatism nonsense imagining the past as so much higher quality. The truth is that superhero movies are the latest incarnation of a type of entertainment which is as old as the oldest human culture we know about. The Iliad is the same kind of entertainment in a different format. Commentators said the same about gladiators chariot races in the Colosseum. There are dick jokes scrawled on the walls of Pompeii.
The childish attitude is making a dichotomy between childish and adult things and criticizing the childish things pretending the latest incarnation is somehow a new kind of thing.
Superhero stories were supposed to represent an escape from the old, adult-focused form of entertainment. Where they ended up was of course just another form of it.
The money quote is: "Wallowing in death isn’t a sophisticated leap beyond the superhero concept; it’s the failure to imagine what it means not to die."
You can liken this to the sitcom. Storytellers had to envision a platform upon which an endless number of stories could be told in a particular format, without getting boring. The setting, including the characters, have to remain static. Breaking the sitcom mold doesn't make for an evolved sitcom, it makes for a devolved one. One that brought back all the problems that the sitcom format resolved.
Superhero comic books had to appeal to seven year-olds, while still retaining enough in there to keep the teens and then adults they grew up into entertained. You need a story that can live forever, and still remain interesting. The bad guys have to get handled with a minimum of fuss, and understated magic, such as Batman never killing anyone, is an appropriate storytelling device. The morality play, good beating evil, and all the whimsy and silliness that conjuring it entailed, is just part of the superhero format.
Without all that, they're not superheroes, they're just story protagonists with special powers that are sometimes heroic. That's the argument the author's making.
I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.
It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).
That has nothing to do with infantilization in our culture. The fact that they also had fart and dick jokes in the past has no bearing on this.
The fact that adults in our culture form their identity around low quality super hero movies in a desperate attempt to recapture their youth and seem fun and then run off to buy the little toys from the ads is the infantilization.
I want to stop you right here, this is a terrible argument with a false premise.
Those two men produced works of contemporary genius that have lasted the test of time.
They are not well known now or in their day because they were lowbrow or made the (occasional!) childish joke. They are well known now and in their day for their transcendence of their respective art form.
They were never viewed as "entertainment for children" like comic books, Pokemon, Lego, etc.
Nobody would look at a 40 year old man in 1820, 1920, or 2020 collecting Mozart sheet music or Shakespeare playbills as being an infantilized man-child.
They are qualitatively different.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_Patroclus
The only hobbies that aren't looked down upon are things that involve creation instead of consumption or are major class signifiers really (Opera, skiing, etc).
I think you may be on to something. Perhaps it's because it feels worse when it is highly intelligent and otherwise reasonable people wasting their time.
Oh, there is. There's a whole school of thought that is basically non-stop hand-wringing about how superheroes are displacing religion, and We Must Take Back Our Media from those Hollywood heathens and so on.
Stupid, yes. But dangerous too - book-burning season looks like it is just getting started, they already are going after Disney, and those people seem geared up for a serious push.
Then there are the comics written by Alan Moore, including The Watchmen. Again, I read these during my formative years but they are most certainly not aimed at children. They do show that these heroes of men, stand ins for the adults of children, are fallible. It was door opening in its literary literary narrative, not just its illustration (which is not the best, as far as comics go - I say to much disapproval).
Many of these comics, which often get maligned as literature for children, are very much written for adults by adults, tackling adult themes and adult sensibilities. Well, they were. Modern comics have lost me, chasing an audience is not a way to sell to the audience, I'm afraid. If you want to capture an audience, it isn't with focus groups and charts and data, it's with story and vision... if you have a real story to tell, you hope there's an audience for it. It's an artistic process, not one grown in a lab =(
The trouble is that after Moore completely deconstructed super hero comics with Watchmen (and Miracle Man, and Miller with Dark Knight, etc.), a new generation thought that's how comics were supposed to be.
But Moore demonstrated that if you extrapolate how super humans would operate in "the real world", it would quickly devolve into a nightmare no one would want to live in.
So "dark" "gritty" "realistic" comics post-Watchmen are really kind of pointless. Watchmen did it better than any of the current authors, and reading them just leads to getting depressed about the depravity of our fantasy worlds, on top of all the things to be depressed about the real one. It's simultaneously indulgent and self defeating.
Comics are alive and well in non-western comic traditions. It's the big two (Marvel,DC) as well some some smaller companies like IDW that can't produce stories people want to read on a regular basis.
You bemoan the consumption of video games and superhero fiction as low value content. And you don’t blame their formats, but their content. But is that right? Past generations were dominated by all sorts of cheap, disposable entertainment- soap operas, radio shows, pulp fiction. What do yearly superhero films resemble? The serial films that arrived at the beginning of cinema. Is this base content really so much baser than the entertainment of the past?
Here's an idea: being an adult shouldn't be one dimensional. I can play with legos, play video games, read scifi and fantasy, and also raise my son, renovate my house, and, I dunno, wrestle bears? Conquer nations? Drink beer and yell at the TV about sports? Or maybe it is denigration of others that you think is the hobby real men do. If so, you're correct, I'm just a child then with my silly belief that people getting joy from activities is a good thing.
Also, there's plenty for kids to get into these days, including comics, books, video games, and whatever. More than I had when I was a kid.
I'm sure others will disagree but I believe playing video games for hours is more infantilizing than hunting, fishing, or tinkering on cars.
The former is content designed by humans (generally working under the aegis of giant corporations) whose goal is to completely capture and dominate your attention to the exclusion of other things. While videogames certainly can be and often are art that tells interesting stories about the human condition, they also often function psychologically much more like junk food and drugs. They give you just enough serotonin hit to get you to keep playing but rarely enough to leave you truly sated. Many games don't want to satisfy because then you'll stop consuming the content.
Hunting and fishing require you to be in nature which has been proven in study after study to be profoundly valuable psychologically and emotionally. They are both boring in a deeply useful way that gives you time to reflect and process your own thoughts. Instead of doom scrolling social media which constantly fills your brain with new information, stressors, and problems that you never have time to sift through, hunting and fishing give your brain the idle time it needs to finally start defragging its memory.
Tinkering on cars forces you to solve difficult challenges. Unlike playing videogames where the stakes are by design relatively low—all you can lose is time—working on a car forces you to confront difficulty and failure where that matters. You can break parts that are expensive to replace. You can fail to find a problem and be left with a car that won't run. That's very helpful for training resilience, problem-solving and equanimity.
All three of these engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands in an integrated, much deeper way than a controller and rectangle of pixels does. The smell of oil or seaweed. The flash of a bobber. The way you feel the pull of the fish in your arms or the recoil of the rifle in your shoulders.
This is something we all know intuitively and it's the constant onslaught of capitalism and the ease of consuming media at home that makes us forget. Videogames can certainly have moments of meaningful joy. But ask yourself this: How often after sinking an hour into a game do you find yourself thinking, "Wow, that really felt like living!" Now how often do you feel that when you go fishing, or hike, or cook a meal for a friend?
For me, 80% of the time I spend playing videogames or watching dumb social media leaves me with the same lingering regret I feel when I eat a bag of chips instead of preparing an actually nutritious meal.
Playing video games is occasionally associated with the NEET crowd, likely because of the low barrier to entry in terms of experience.
Exploring nature and working on mechanical things requires some prior knowledge, experience and/or space to get started.
There is a fair amount of good content, in both video games and comic books. Both are fairly reasonably considered art. I don't see a lot of people saying we should destroy art museums because they're escapism.
Yes, there's a lot of bad video games and comic books, too. But I dare say exactly that is true of arts, books, and a variety of other things people widely consider worthwhile forms of entertainment.
The entire point of the transition from childhood to adulthood is that you become responsible for yourself and others which is a transition from you being the responsibility of others.
The idea that responsibilities are somehow an injustice has dominated thinking of my generation and latter. I really enjoy playing a round of Elden Ring after I've gotten all my house work done and taken care of the things that people rely on me for. Just on the basic standards of household maintenance I'm shocked how often my friends apartments look like they are lived in by a teenager.
The whole idea of "ghosting" is another example of this bizarre inability to just do the things you need to do. Being an "adult" in just about any culture, means you do somethings that are uncomfortable because those things need to be done. Sure it can be hard to tell some people "no" but ignoring them completely because you can't stand a bit of discomfort is the very essence of "childish" behavior.
I grew up in a dysfunctional household, where I was not taken care of as a child, so I was very eager to become an adult. Taking responsibility and taking care of myself where things I looked forward to because I'd be taken care of, even if I was the one doing it.
Now that climate change is starting to show undeniable consequences it's a bit hard for me to take demands for climate action seriously from people who just a few months ago complained about "adulting" when doing their own taxes in their late 20s.
What if I told you I ghost people because I don't care and it has nothing to do with maturity.
I experience 0 discomfort cutting ties and relationships with people that I've moved on from or didn't see myself interacting with in the first place. I find no grace in extending interactions to make some people feel better that feel like they're owed conversation or an explanation. What's so wrong with just moving on? If someone doesn't gel with you or reply, you should really just take the hint. Or would it be better for me to be honest and say something like, "Sorry, I just find you intolerable once I got to know you, so I think it's better if you don't talk to me anymore, thank you!"
I think it's childish to expect everyone to give you the time of day in a world where we are busier than ever before. I'd prefer to be ghosted by people who decide to ghost me.
Most people complain about "adulting" do it in jest or use it as a device to insult the job their parents did of teaching them important skills. I raised myself and I never complain about "adulting" but find it fun to groan about becoming older.
I think when you reach the age of like 25, you realize that you don't have a clue, and the "adults" around you mostly don't have a clue either.
But it's always been like that. It is in fact a childish view to conceive of adulthood as some fundamentally different stage of life where everything changes and you've got it all figured out.
The real difference with past generations is that you were expected and able to slot into a rigid social order, to fill a certain role. That rigidity has partly been rejected, and is partly simply out of reach due to economic factors.
high quality comics targeted at adults have existed in europe for decades. there was no infantilization there. and the fact that i enjoy playing videogames occasionally allows me to spend quality time with my children in ways that my parents never could.
If you had a time machine and went back a couple thousand years, I think you'd find that people already did unproductive things for entertainment.
And people have probably been disapproving of younger generations enjoying the wrong entertainment for about as long as we've done things for entertainment.
I have a liking for the current crop of superhero stuff because its light-hearted. The tone is hopeful. (It's ironic, honestly, that the article goes on about the mature/miserable nature of current superhero stuff when the flagship Marvel stuff is all pretty positive, with the exception of the ten-year culmination of the Avengers storyline they cite). It's a nice break from worrying about the real world, which these days seems to have this constant, vague, oppressive feeling of inevitable doom. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but the universal problems around corruption, collective action issues, personal wealth above general good, etc. is tiring and depressing.)
Maturity is, in my opinion, a function of one's perception of the consequences of their actions and how they weigh said consequences. An immature person, regardless of their hobbies behaves like a child when they don't consider e.g. the feelings of other people or the harm they impose onto others. As we get older and accumulate more experiences through interactions with other people, we tend to take into consideration a far longer and wider horizon. This usually happens by increasing one's responsibilities as they become older.
What-ho!
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So you think they should move on to an "adult" hobby like stamp collecting or model trains?
This comment complains that adults are somehow children because they engage with entertainment formats that were traditionally geared towards children.
Why do you care what other men do with their spare time?
Maybe spend less time thinking about what other people ought to enjoy and find something that makes you happy.
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Look, I consume all of this cultural junk food you mentioned. But at least I recognise it as such.
The fact that others are in a so vehement denial about it just shows EXACTLY how right you are. Minds of childs.
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The only enormous time and energy sink I’ve seen that’s completely universal and worse than marvel movies or funko pops is Posting — random grown adults online that have been told that their opinions should hold sway over other random adults online because of the sheer value of their opinions. For every sad weirdo with a room full of expensive anime figurines, there are hundreds of sad, weird Facebook Aunts espousing “the importance of traditional values and maybe urine therapy”
It’s like we’ve all got a new commonality. It used to be eating, shitting, pissing, fucking and sleeping. Now it’s that plus “screaming into an uncaring void”
The idea is when so much of our agency is stripped from us, often the last thing we can hold onto—which we hold onto tightly because it is the last thing—is comtempt. You can crush me under your boot. You can make me sing the party's songs. But you can't make me believe them. You may own my body but not my mind.
We in the US are living in a time of deep cynicism and distrust of all of the institutions Americans used to hold dear. The degree to which that distrust is misplaced is an open question but the distrust itself is unequivocal.
I look at the current culture of anti-heroes and dark superheroes as a reaction to that. We are so distrustful of anyone or thing claiming to be good that a brightly-colored positive superhero today would earn only contempt from us. We'd assume it must be a deceitful facade.
All that leaves us is morally corrupted dark anti-heroes that are least openly flawed and whose contempt for the other institutions of justice mirrors our own.
Except most modern superhero movies aren't like that at all, if anything much of the genre seems to be a tonal rejection of the cynicism and nihilism you're describing.
There was a similar cycle in the late 80s and 90s, when there was a rush of "mature" super hero comics.
What is the case? What is the bad outcome that happens to a 7 year old who watches a PG-13 movie? (Or more generally, a population of 7 year olds who watch PG-13 movies)
Like, what’s the bad “thing” that we should be able to see?
That's what we do. It works great. I know our kids and what they can handle. Some PG-13 movies are fine for our 5-6 yr olds, some are not.
But yes, the rating shelters children from women's nipples, everyone's genitals, and naughty words.
I know this is the internet and everyone just reads the headline, but comments like this are frustrating.
They are a lot of fun once you understand the art form, but there are a lot of problematic things with them, just like any work from 80 years ago.
I got into reading some of them with my 5 year old daughter, and she loves the old ones. I sometimes have to explain some things to her, and why some things we read aren’t ok, but she likes them.
We also found quite a few more modern comics that are perfect for kids her age. We love reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur together, and we also love reading Squirrel Girl comics. We stay away from some of the more dark comics that feature the most popular super heroes.
I guess my point is that there are a lot more super hero comics than just the MCU ones, and some are much more kid appropriate than others. I appreciate a world that has adult and kid comics. Why can’t we have both?
One other thing I noticed with my two kids (6 and 3 now) is that what scares and traumatizes them the most aren’t the things that scare adult me the most. For example, I am way more disturbed by death than my kids. Characters dying don’t bother my kids like it does me. I think it is likely due to not really understanding what death is, exactly. They have not lost people and don’t understand the permanence.
On the other hand, random things that don’t seem scary at all can scare the crap out of them. My 3 year old will want to watch the fight to the death between sharptooth and little foot’s mom in Land Before Time over and over, but freaks out over the opening montage in Moana.
The joy of exploration, 'cool' moments, downright insane attacks, friendship and slapstick humor appealed to 10 yr old me. 20 years from then, it is still the best work of fantasy fiction I have ever read. Oda has managed to preserve all of those moments of childlike joy and unbridled creativity, while injecting societally relevant themes of authoritarianism, discrimination, the complex nature of morality and art that moves the genre forward, in a manner that is superior to a lot of grim-dark works meant to do exactly that. The current arc exemplifies that quality, 25 years since it started.
Calling a manga with 500 million sales underrated is ridiculous, but I find that it is still not appreciated enough in American & 'critic' spaces.
Here in the US, it is common to ignore manga because of the stereotypes that come with certain genres within it. However, I find that Japan's best artists & story-tellers find manga as their medium for expression more often than western counterparts.
I find that American culture tends to invade American media in a way that demands attention until the next 'big' issue is identified. Every community is forced to comment on the one issue, in a manner that kills all diversity and 'magic' from creative works. It feels lazy and repetitive. To some degree, it might do some good for American culture and American media to reorient towards more localized concerns, and not care so much about what is ruling the 1st-page of the new cycle.
I suspect that either there is some selective memory going on here, or the writer's parents were very careful about what parts of the comics world they were exposed to.
[1] old enough to have a 26-year-old one even
[2] though much less so as the grimier ones didn't get the TV treatment, or the grime was mostly washed off
That's not to say Power Rangers was bad, but Spider-Man and Gargoyles were interesting in that they used multi-episode storylines with multiple acts. Outside of their visual motifs they weren't dark series. They were just offering narratives for older kids that were reading books and comics and playing video games.
The Disney Duck comics used to be moderately popular in the USA, though they remain popular outside the country they're basically moribund here.
Archie comics continues to publish but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.