Is Pop Culture Beyond Saving?

  There was a time, around the early 2010’s or so, when it seemed like all of us media dorks agreed on pretty much everything…

In general: We all loved the original trilogy and hated the prequel trilogy and were excited for the sequel trilogy. We all hated the Andrew Garfield movies and wanted Spider-Man to feel like a genuine kid. We all hated Zack Snyder and wanted DC to feel “lighthearted” like Marvel. We all loved the MCU. Perhaps most controversially to say; a lot of us were getting tired of the typical white guy hero and wanted some more diversity…

Now everything is fucked. Literally all the examples I typed above don’t even apply anymore, and that’s just the big stuff. You also have smaller examples like how, just few a years ago, everyone seemed to worship filmmakers like Favreau & Filoni, Benioff & Weiss, Taika Waititi, etc. Now, though? Not so much…

All of this has left two questions lingering in my mind:

1.What the fuck happened?

2.Can we ever get back to a point where we all agree on everything again?

The answer to that second question is no, but to understand why, we need to dissect the first question, uhh, first…

To put it simply; fans turning on their favorite franchises and/or creators can all be tied back to one root cause… They all overstay their welcome, but they also can’t stop, because money is money.

That’s literally it. Nothing more, nothing less. With enough time, a “counter culture” develops for any piece of media. Similarly, with enough time, a creator fumbles. The only exceptions are the people who take their time with everything, like JRR Tolkien and Cormac McCarthy. That said, not everyone can afford to be like Tolkien and McCarthy (both of whom had side jobs at universities, anyways). For most popular creators, creating is their business, and they have to keep going. Sometimes that means doubling down on familiar characters, worlds, etc., even long after those stories may have reached their natural conclusions…

As both a writer on the side and a geek, all of this has put me in a difficult position. For a long time, I based my whole identity around these fandoms. This was fine back in the early-to-mid 2010’s, cause my own opinions matched up with the general consensus in those days, but that’s no longer the case. On a similar note, as a writer, I’m starting to get closer and closer to potentially crafting sequels to my own work, which sorta goes against my point earlier about a lot of these things “overstaying their welcome.”

So, in both of these cases, what’s the solution? For being a fan of things, it’s easy; just look for other things to be a fan of. I myself am slowly moving away from stuff like Star Wars and superheroes, and instead shifting my focus towards other things like Cameron’s Avatar, Dune, etc. I suppose another route would be to try to keep finding more and more people to talk about the same things with, but I feel like even that would have a limit (despite how big these fandoms are, and how interconnected the world is now).

        For where to go as a writer, the answer is a little more complicated. I want to make sequels to my own stuff, but when will I know it’s the right time to stop? While typing this very post, I think I’ve reached an epiphany: All stories can have two endings; the happily ever after ending, and the real life ending…

Perhaps no story better exemplifies this than the 1967 film The Graduate (which itself is based on a book from 1963). In the very last shot of the movie, we see Dustin Hoffman and his girlfriend escape from her shit family on the back of a bus. Both of them are smiling. The movie could’ve just ended here… But it doesn’t. A few more seconds go by, and suddenly, their smiles morph into frowns. We can tell they’re both thinking “Crap, now what?” Sure, they’re free of Mrs. Robinson, but now they’re broke, with nowhere to go… In literally less than a minute, without any dialogue, the story goes from a happily ever after ending, to a real life ending…

Stories can either end on a high, or they can end in a way that reminds us how conflicts/resolutions are destined to repeat in cycles forever. Toy Story 3 is happily ever after. Toy Story 4 is real life. Return of the Jedi is happily ever after. The sequel trilogy is real life… That doesn’t mean stuff like Toy Story 4 and the sequel trilogy are entirely bad, mind you. They just are what they are…

This is all to say that, once you’ve done both your happily ever after ending and your real life ending, you should probably stop, unless you feel you have a really good reason not to, like if your series operates more as an anthology. But that would likely involve having a protagonist who’s really more just there to “observe” a story and interact with the real protagonist of each installment (which is how mysteries tend to work). I thought I was that kinda writer, but now I’m not so sure. I think I prefer seeing viewpoint characters go through changes…

Anyways, if you’re a movie geek or a storyteller (or both, like me), hopefully all this dribble drabble here gave you at least something to chew on…

Peace!

UPDATE 1: Something I forgot to mention earlier is that the whole “passing of the torch” thing doesn’t really work as well as it should, bar a few exceptions (Frodo Baggins, Miles Morales, etc.). Spin-offs are also generally not a good idea (again, bar a few exceptions like Solo). I think it may be best to just stick with one main protagonist throughout a series. Either that or maybe stop after a generation (25 years at most) of telling a certain story.

UPDATE 2: Another epiphany I just had is that people in pop culture fandoms tend to want to discuss negativity more than positivity because, when we feel negative about something, we want think about how it could’ve been better. Conversely, when something is “good enough,” we don’t care as much. But the longer you keep something around, the more you have to justify it’s existence, which hurts its chances of continuing to be “good enough.”