When’s the last time you cried? I mean had a real soul searer where you had snot coming out of your nose and lost a little breath. What are the emotions you associate with this event? Sadness? Hopelessness? A sense of personal failure? Or maybe you were just glad to have something sincere to emotionally resonate with, and the particular cause of the emotion doesn’t matter.
I’m willing to bet that the largest portion of those answering chose the final answer; most of the time it isn’t that your grandma or pet turtle died, it’s “merely” that you encountered an emotional sentiment in the world/media that moved you and caused your own latent emotion to emerge. This is one of the most enjoyable and cathartic aspects of consuming media; the big tear-jerker moments that set the tone of the story and move the characters forward.
However there is a not so insidious trend in almost every media field; namely the trend towards irony and ironic meta commentary. Characters so often interrupt one another to say “You done?” Or, “Jeez, that was so corny” that it defies belief; especially movies made post, say, 2018 this is painfully noticeable in. One could point to the Marvel franchise as poster boys for this style of character dialogue, which is roughly based on “real” millennials speech patterns. However, I’ve rarely seen the obvious moment ruining that frequently occurs in these kinds of movies and TV shows in real life; I suspect that this is as much monkey see monkey do as it is wanting to be “authentic”… which is a funny word because you would think “authenticity” would be aligned with “sincerity”, but it is not…authenticity is cool because, well, because of forced woke diversity and all that crap… “We want our advertising campaigns to feel authentic to today’s youth”… it basically just means demographically researched.
Sincerity on the other hand is a tricky little thing. It doesn’t tend to be captured well by corporate directives or 12 young(ish) people talking about product design in a boardroom. Art that feel sincere is rare and seems to be becoming even rarer in the post “Marvelisation” phase. I think one could fairly easily make the argument that as the barriers to producing art of all kinds are lowered, the proportion of art that evokes a strong/sincere emotional response decreases. When there was nothing but the Lascaux caves, every piece of art was sacred and just viewing them likely provoked a profound state. Nowadays we live in a media saturated world where there is more “critically acclaimed” art that is released than one person or even an industry of critics can keep up with.
But, a lot of this so-called good art is 1, systematically undermined by the environmental conditions that it itself creates, 2, incapable of sincerity to such an extent that one ultimately questions whether the art is good or not.
This first point captures a large percentage of modern corpretized content; no matter what the content itself tries to do, the overall environment is one of snarky meta-analysis and insincerity, which tends to sap meaning from everything in a media space at the same time; the second point becomes an issue when a specific piece of content is incapable of achieving certain “beats” because the emotional response associated with genuinely caring about something is sealed off.
I find this issue as a whole interesting because their certainly seems to be a feedback loop between generational expressions of discontent, like excessive irony, and the specific media marketed to members of that generation. For example, I suspect that a good deal of anime’s enduring appeal comes from the fact that it is over-sincere, that it deals with the events depicted in an extremely earnest and heartfelt manner; in this regard it serves as a kind of antidote to the ultra-meta, ultra self-aware nature of Western media specifically.
One final word of warning to millennials about irony. You will likely find, if you are an observant person, that older people, and people occupying prominent positions within society, are generally non-ironic; they don’t derive comfort from diminishing the events in their lives, and in fact are the type more likely to take offence regarding their pet issues.
Many politicians and individuals with public responsibility are like this; they take the work they do very seriously and do not appreciate attempts at pointing out otherwise. Are they necessarily correct in these views? No, but again, these are the people who have accumulated power and respect, which presumably you will want to do once you hit 30 and are done adventuring. If you are managing a large scale business or political enterprise, going “oh, wow, that’s like soooooo corny” during a rival’s speech is not going to help you in any way.
This relates somewhat to the issue of internal versus external attribution of blame; ironists have a very strong aversion to turning the focus of their criticism inward, and helping someone to do so, even a little bit, can help them overcome an addiction to the ironic worldview.
The larger observation in this is that younger, more immature people tend to be more ironic while those who have suffered a meaningful amount and learnt the value of love through loss tend to be more serious. So I strongly suspect that many Rick and Morty fans will outgrow that phase; I used to have hundreds of Simpsons quote’s memorized, but when I realized what negative programming a lot of that content was, I slowly drifted towards other stuff.
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