(Substack angrily told me "Please type a shorter comment", so I suppose I have to split this in two pieces.)
"And if there is ever a mainstream art movement to be built on the Right, I think it must be cultivated with the implicit understanding that Leftwing art is low status. To bring up Star Wars at the table should earn the same looks as people had during the Bud Light boycott. And it should stay that way. "
I don't think this is a winning proposition, because it can only mean one of two things:
- Talking about Star Wars, as it currently is and in its modern incarnations, is cringe.
- Talking about Star Wars of any variety, including the original and best stories, is cringe.
I'd wager that the majority of Critical Drinker's and Shadiversity's regular watchers - and I'm one of them - are only interested in modern Star Wars for the purposes of mocking it. I just opened up Critical Drinker's video about The Acolyte Episode 5, sorted the comments by 'new', and filtered out spam, gibberish, and off-topic discussions; roughly 2 comments in 10 are praising the show (whether sincerely or trolling, hard to say), 5 out of 10 are arguing that the lightsaber headbutt isn't a 'plot hole' so much as an act of plagiarism from far-superior source material in the Thrawn Trilogy, and the remaining 3 out of 10 are attributing the downfall of Star Wars to feminism, anti-white racism, incompetence, or a combination thereof. Those 8 out of 10 would probably describe modern Star Wars as low-status and would probably agree that *enjoying* it, or even watching it (aside from the one person a million taking one for the team and writing reviews) is cringe.
Disney+ subscriptions are packaged in with various Verizon and Xfinity internet / cable TV plans, along with various other bundles for other entertainment. It reaches a LOT of people. As of the latest Disney investor report (don't know if the spam filter will block the link, but if you search '2023 Annual Report Disney filetype:pdf' it'll be the first result), the two branches of Disney+ had a combined total of 141 million subscribers worldwide. If Critical Drinker and Shadiversity et al. stopped talking about Star Wars entirely, along with 100% of their audiences, those 141 million subscribers would still have advertisements for The Acolyte broadcast on their TVs as screensavers and recommended to them whenever they sit on the couch and try to find something to watch. A decent number would probably watch it.
And if that kind of garbage is all you're watching, your standards for what's good and what isn't will get lower and lower. I don't know a single person who decided to watch The Acolyte after seeing a scathing review of it online. I know several who decided to watch it because it was the first available option on the TV, and who kept watching because it was marginally better than burning out their dopamine receptors on TikTok. They're not being persuaded to watch TV. They were already going to watch TV.
I heard more people mentioning (and mocking) Bud Light during the boycott than I ever had before the boycott, even with Bud Light's legendary ad campaigns like "Real Men of Genius". You can't get to "Talking about modern Star Wars is cringe" without first passing through "Enjoying modern Star Wars is cringe, and let's make fun of modern Star Wars and its enjoyers". You might be past both stages, but the average Disney+ subscriber is not yet at either stage. If you mean the first interpretation, then your proposition is that you want the effect without the cause. That's a hard sell.
The second interpretation, obviously, is going to be an even harder sell. Most of the people attacking modern Star Wars online hate the feeling of helplessness against the seven deadly sins that seem to be swallowing up the world. They write scathing reviews and comments because feeling cathartic rage lets them feel like they're fighting back. If, in addition to the other problems, you tell them that they have to cede further ground and declare that the Left can not only ruin things that are but things that have been...well, you're telling them to embrace the teddy bear from an infamous Critical Drinker review of Doctor Who a few years back. You're telling them to give the Left exactly what it wants in the one area where they think they can fight back.
The Left wants to rewrite history, and your pitch is that we should let history be rewritten. Star Wars isn't just about intersectional feminism now - Star Wars has *always* about intersectional feminism, just as Great Britain has always been full of black royalty.
You might understand why people could object to this.
"The fact is, on a dopamine per second scale, the Right will lose to the Left every single time. But the good news is that the Left have been reduced to only selling dopamine. Their stories and entertainment have long departed from actual meaning. Their trash sends people looking farther and farther afield for better entertainment.
I don’t think we can win this war on scale, but we can certainly try with quality. The future of the Right’s art is in a small, highly focused group of people. The only question is whether we can grow this group to such a critical mass that it can generate discussions spontaneously outside of its influence. Then we’ll know we have something real on our hands."
I'm burying this comment in a locked post that a single-digit number of people will ever read, because it's the only way not to seem like an attack:
Your writing isn't good. The Left is significantly better at dopamine than you are at quality.
You're aware of this already; it takes a tremendous amount of work to write high-quality stories. You've mentioned being in your early 20s. There's a number of Internet artists / writers I know of (Randall Munroe, Sam Hughes, Zach Weiner, the Abstruse Goose guy, Jon Bois, Allie Brosh, Karl Jobst, and Scott Alexander, among many others), and who were all born within a couple years of each other, in 1984±2. All of them were already very active online at 20 years old circa ~2004, when they'd have been (I'm guessing) roughly your age, but not a single one had taken off yet, nor produced anything they'd currently be proud of. It takes years of practice to get good. You know this. You're working on it. I hope to see you get there. I wouldn't be subscribed if I didn't.
But worrying about marketing does not make sense, because right now you're writing fiction for practice, to hone your skills, not to reach an audience or change minds. Jesse Abraham Lucas put it best, a couple weeks ago, on Twitter:
- One reason people talk more about left wing art even in right wing circles is you can criticize left wing art as much as you want without hurting the feelings of someone you care about or "punching right," you can even praise its virtues (showing you to be rational)
- I read something one of us puts out - the skill, the diplomacy required to talk about it objectively, praise and criticize it appropriately, is beyond me. Many creators are simultaneously "examples of great RW art" and "just starting out don't be so harsh." No incentive to growth
- And so I don't talk about it, or perhaps I help to shill it without any grasp of its content, and RW art remains, in this space, a totem, something people are definitely doing because they should be doing it, but not anything people talk about.
- I write poetry, it's all right, I've gotten very little criticism of it, no one's analyzed a JAL poem that I know of. When I have gotten hints of something I could improve, my critics vanish at my response, unwilling to enter the necessary kind of arguments.
- I want critics to be angry at me, I want feuds splitting GCs apart, I want embarrassing poems written in my style mocking me from behind anon accounts, that would mean energy in the system, but there's no energy in the system because it's a totem
- [Separate tweet, not part of the same thread] Also powerful, and useful, are poetry haters, acidic critics who can find something to tear apart about any poem. Some of the finest poets were driven to new heights by their haters.
Lucas puts the absurdity of the situation in sharp relief at the end of his thread. Kipling and Chesterton and Belloc and Frost and Swinburne and Shakespeare all had loads of people in their audiences who cared about poetry, who'd read them if they were good but stop reading them if they were bad (and viciously attack them if they were *really* bad; you should see the gallons of ink spilled about Swinburne in the 1850s). They had market forces to stop their heads from being in the clouds, to give them instant reality checks if they screwed up, and to teach them what actually appeals to people and what doesn't. Lucas doesn't. Neither he nor anyone else writes poetry to reach a wide audience; Sam Garland, as /u/PoemForYourSprog on Reddit, has written multiple poems a day for a decade and a half, gets thousands of sincere upvotes on every one, has more practice and instant feedback than probably any other contemporary poet in the English language, and cannot crack the top million best-sellers on Amazon for either of his anthology books. Poetry is dead.
In the same way, you can't writing novels to reach a wide audience, because if you were trying to reach a wide audience, you wouldn't be writing novels. The novel, as an artform, is almost as dead as poetry. If you wanted to be popular and gain an audience for the purpose of slowly turning them right-wing, you'd be doing the kinds of things that make you popular and gain you an audience. You'd make speedrunning videos, earn five thousand dollars for a 90-second Manscaped advertisement, get acquired by Clover Talent, and (popularity mission accomplished) start slowly edging your audience rightward by refusing to take the Lord's name in vain, declaring "This is a Christian Minecraft server!" as a running gag enough times that your viewers start pretending to act Christian (as a joke), making analogies to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun when grinding for a Doom world record, and spending two and a half hours a day ruthlessly purging your Discord server of transvestite would-be moderators. And that's assuming that you don't just become The Catholic Thinker and review TV shows instead.
You're not in this for the popularity or the money. You have the option of trying to be a 'content creator' and honing your skills at appealing to a huge audience, and the option of trying to be an author and honing your skills at quality fiction-writing, and you've chosen the latter. This isn't a bad thing! But it becomes counterproductive to your goals if you mistake one for the other.
A decent number of people on the Right have reposted your stories on Twitter. Searching for 'Gigaheroes' on Twitter, I see dozens of people recommending your story, linking to it, and praising it. By contrast, I only see a couple people talking about specific story elements (one of whom was egged on by you to read it, and read it for the same reason Critical Drinker watches The Acolyte), and I see a grand total of one person on the Internet quoting any specific line from it. It's not that there are no discussions happening outside 'our' influence - it's that there's no discussions happening *inside* either. That's because 'we' - the small, highly focused group of people that are the future of Right art - are not focused on reading your work.
We don't want to punch right. We don't want to blow out your sparks before they have a chance to catch. We're focused on circling the wagons around our creators the same way the Left circles the wagons around theirs. You want the Right to stand by its authors the way the Left does; this is our best attempt at it. The Left promotes books that it doesn't actually read. So do we.
RW art is a totem, like Lucas says. Use the totem to your advantage. Pour your heart and soul into writing a novel, post about it, and get just enough encouragement from retweets and likes to keep going for the next novel. The speedrunner Wirtual said once that he spent ten thousand hours playing Trackmania because "Trackmania is the outlet for me to experience mastery". Make novel-writing *your* outlet for experiencing mastery. Become intimately familiar with the process. Learn *how* to master a craft. Get so good that occasional lines get shared without attribution, like screencaps of deleted Twitter accounts or 2013-era /pol/, in those occasional 'discussions outside our influence'. Write books that satisfy you, that you really think are first-class work, that let you experience the pride of workmanship and a job well done.
And if, after that, you still want popularity, then quit novel-writing and use what you've learned to do something else.
I think there is a level of separation from the article that needs to be addressed. I’m not putting myself forward as THE RW art scene. For quality over quantity, I’m more referring to the likes of Zero HP Lovecraft + people who have actually had real success with their fiction. While I’m not ashamed to put my stuff as an alternative, I also know I’m a very small fish in a very big pond. I have to brazen, otherwise I don’t get noticed at all.
I intended this article for a broad overview, trends I see happening over the coming decade. In a sense, Star Wars is already cringe to talk about. People don’t come to it with the same enthusiasm as they once did. I think that’s undeniable. I’m talking about an environment where that’s more pronounced. I want a point in the culture war where there is a real parallel structure to Hollywood that can create dividing lines of cultural consumption.
I think that popularity is very important. As you said yourself, Gigaheroes does not receive much in the way of critical feedback. And I don’t think it ever will. Excellent critique requires mainstream investment. We should strive for popularity as much as we can.
"I want a point in the culture war where there is a real parallel structure to Hollywood that can create dividing lines of cultural consumption."
We're definitely in agreement about that. The problem I see is that competing with Hollywood in movie against movie (e.g. Godzilla Minus One, Sound of Freedom) is very different than competing with Hollywood in movie against book. Casual audiences probably find movies fungible with each other to a degree. As you say, making our own movies is not in the cards right now, but until it is we can't *really* make a parallel structure to Hollywood.
Twitch and Instagram are fundamentally different than Hollywood in how they work; they've attracted a huge number of boys and girls respectively, and are almost certainly more of a cultural influence than movies to teenagers right now, but the Twitch streamers and Instagram flutterers didn't get there by thinking "I want to parallel Hollywood". It's the wrong mindset, and if they had thought that, they'd have failed at attracting their actual audience. And - though I can't find it at the moment - I think you wrote a piece saying almost exactly the same thing, somewhere.
I don’t want a parallel Hollywood per se, as in a one to one structure. I just want a nodes that serve as alternate creative hubs. I think recreating Hollywood is a mistake. I don’t think recreating its original functions is.
Back in the 1900s through the 1920s, the traditional plays and operas had gotten very stale on the American scene, and the parallel structure of vaudeville was opening up a scene much more in tune with what audiences actually wanted to watch. The vaudevillians went to radio almost as soon as radio became a big thing in the 1920s, and some of the remaining ones transitioned to TV in the 1950s, once that became practical. I wonder if that's the historical model we should be looking at. I wonder if Twitch is our vaudeville.
By the way, thanks for all your feedback! If you have any more criticisms of Gigaheroes, I would love to hear them. I’m thick skinned enough to take a good licking ;)
My pleasure; I'm just trying to get in on the ground floor. Writing a 2000 word essay criticizing somebody else is a lot easier than writing 2000 words in an original work that somebody else might criticize...oh dear. I *am* becoming Critical Drinker.
> I don’t expect the YouTube critic crowd to stop making videos slamming modern media. I think we are well past that opportunity now. But we must adopt a frame of fundamental disgust. Star Wars in its current iteration is to be spat upon. The thing you loved is long gone, and it’s been turned against you. I’m not suggesting feeding into outrage, but rather adopting an apathetic contempt. And that applies to everything mediocre or “good” Star Wars produces going forward.
People above 16 year old should not be watching Star Wars (old or new) in any case. That's another case of man-children culture... 20-somethings watched Casablanca or the Godfather or Taxi Driver or the Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction back in the day, now 30+ somethings line up for the 15th Star Wars movie.
There's always sci-fi books, or more mature sci-fi movies like Bladerunner if you want to have that space fix after teenhood.
I think I can sum up my thousands of words thus: we will only make art enjoyed by the general public after we make art that we enjoy amongst ourselves. If we’re having a good time, other people may want in on it; if we're not, they won't.
(Substack angrily told me "Please type a shorter comment", so I suppose I have to split this in two pieces.)
"And if there is ever a mainstream art movement to be built on the Right, I think it must be cultivated with the implicit understanding that Leftwing art is low status. To bring up Star Wars at the table should earn the same looks as people had during the Bud Light boycott. And it should stay that way. "
I don't think this is a winning proposition, because it can only mean one of two things:
- Talking about Star Wars, as it currently is and in its modern incarnations, is cringe.
- Talking about Star Wars of any variety, including the original and best stories, is cringe.
I'd wager that the majority of Critical Drinker's and Shadiversity's regular watchers - and I'm one of them - are only interested in modern Star Wars for the purposes of mocking it. I just opened up Critical Drinker's video about The Acolyte Episode 5, sorted the comments by 'new', and filtered out spam, gibberish, and off-topic discussions; roughly 2 comments in 10 are praising the show (whether sincerely or trolling, hard to say), 5 out of 10 are arguing that the lightsaber headbutt isn't a 'plot hole' so much as an act of plagiarism from far-superior source material in the Thrawn Trilogy, and the remaining 3 out of 10 are attributing the downfall of Star Wars to feminism, anti-white racism, incompetence, or a combination thereof. Those 8 out of 10 would probably describe modern Star Wars as low-status and would probably agree that *enjoying* it, or even watching it (aside from the one person a million taking one for the team and writing reviews) is cringe.
Disney+ subscriptions are packaged in with various Verizon and Xfinity internet / cable TV plans, along with various other bundles for other entertainment. It reaches a LOT of people. As of the latest Disney investor report (don't know if the spam filter will block the link, but if you search '2023 Annual Report Disney filetype:pdf' it'll be the first result), the two branches of Disney+ had a combined total of 141 million subscribers worldwide. If Critical Drinker and Shadiversity et al. stopped talking about Star Wars entirely, along with 100% of their audiences, those 141 million subscribers would still have advertisements for The Acolyte broadcast on their TVs as screensavers and recommended to them whenever they sit on the couch and try to find something to watch. A decent number would probably watch it.
And if that kind of garbage is all you're watching, your standards for what's good and what isn't will get lower and lower. I don't know a single person who decided to watch The Acolyte after seeing a scathing review of it online. I know several who decided to watch it because it was the first available option on the TV, and who kept watching because it was marginally better than burning out their dopamine receptors on TikTok. They're not being persuaded to watch TV. They were already going to watch TV.
I heard more people mentioning (and mocking) Bud Light during the boycott than I ever had before the boycott, even with Bud Light's legendary ad campaigns like "Real Men of Genius". You can't get to "Talking about modern Star Wars is cringe" without first passing through "Enjoying modern Star Wars is cringe, and let's make fun of modern Star Wars and its enjoyers". You might be past both stages, but the average Disney+ subscriber is not yet at either stage. If you mean the first interpretation, then your proposition is that you want the effect without the cause. That's a hard sell.
The second interpretation, obviously, is going to be an even harder sell. Most of the people attacking modern Star Wars online hate the feeling of helplessness against the seven deadly sins that seem to be swallowing up the world. They write scathing reviews and comments because feeling cathartic rage lets them feel like they're fighting back. If, in addition to the other problems, you tell them that they have to cede further ground and declare that the Left can not only ruin things that are but things that have been...well, you're telling them to embrace the teddy bear from an infamous Critical Drinker review of Doctor Who a few years back. You're telling them to give the Left exactly what it wants in the one area where they think they can fight back.
The Left wants to rewrite history, and your pitch is that we should let history be rewritten. Star Wars isn't just about intersectional feminism now - Star Wars has *always* about intersectional feminism, just as Great Britain has always been full of black royalty.
You might understand why people could object to this.
"The fact is, on a dopamine per second scale, the Right will lose to the Left every single time. But the good news is that the Left have been reduced to only selling dopamine. Their stories and entertainment have long departed from actual meaning. Their trash sends people looking farther and farther afield for better entertainment.
I don’t think we can win this war on scale, but we can certainly try with quality. The future of the Right’s art is in a small, highly focused group of people. The only question is whether we can grow this group to such a critical mass that it can generate discussions spontaneously outside of its influence. Then we’ll know we have something real on our hands."
I'm burying this comment in a locked post that a single-digit number of people will ever read, because it's the only way not to seem like an attack:
Your writing isn't good. The Left is significantly better at dopamine than you are at quality.
You're aware of this already; it takes a tremendous amount of work to write high-quality stories. You've mentioned being in your early 20s. There's a number of Internet artists / writers I know of (Randall Munroe, Sam Hughes, Zach Weiner, the Abstruse Goose guy, Jon Bois, Allie Brosh, Karl Jobst, and Scott Alexander, among many others), and who were all born within a couple years of each other, in 1984±2. All of them were already very active online at 20 years old circa ~2004, when they'd have been (I'm guessing) roughly your age, but not a single one had taken off yet, nor produced anything they'd currently be proud of. It takes years of practice to get good. You know this. You're working on it. I hope to see you get there. I wouldn't be subscribed if I didn't.
But worrying about marketing does not make sense, because right now you're writing fiction for practice, to hone your skills, not to reach an audience or change minds. Jesse Abraham Lucas put it best, a couple weeks ago, on Twitter:
- One reason people talk more about left wing art even in right wing circles is you can criticize left wing art as much as you want without hurting the feelings of someone you care about or "punching right," you can even praise its virtues (showing you to be rational)
- I read something one of us puts out - the skill, the diplomacy required to talk about it objectively, praise and criticize it appropriately, is beyond me. Many creators are simultaneously "examples of great RW art" and "just starting out don't be so harsh." No incentive to growth
- And so I don't talk about it, or perhaps I help to shill it without any grasp of its content, and RW art remains, in this space, a totem, something people are definitely doing because they should be doing it, but not anything people talk about.
- I write poetry, it's all right, I've gotten very little criticism of it, no one's analyzed a JAL poem that I know of. When I have gotten hints of something I could improve, my critics vanish at my response, unwilling to enter the necessary kind of arguments.
- I want critics to be angry at me, I want feuds splitting GCs apart, I want embarrassing poems written in my style mocking me from behind anon accounts, that would mean energy in the system, but there's no energy in the system because it's a totem
- [Separate tweet, not part of the same thread] Also powerful, and useful, are poetry haters, acidic critics who can find something to tear apart about any poem. Some of the finest poets were driven to new heights by their haters.
Lucas puts the absurdity of the situation in sharp relief at the end of his thread. Kipling and Chesterton and Belloc and Frost and Swinburne and Shakespeare all had loads of people in their audiences who cared about poetry, who'd read them if they were good but stop reading them if they were bad (and viciously attack them if they were *really* bad; you should see the gallons of ink spilled about Swinburne in the 1850s). They had market forces to stop their heads from being in the clouds, to give them instant reality checks if they screwed up, and to teach them what actually appeals to people and what doesn't. Lucas doesn't. Neither he nor anyone else writes poetry to reach a wide audience; Sam Garland, as /u/PoemForYourSprog on Reddit, has written multiple poems a day for a decade and a half, gets thousands of sincere upvotes on every one, has more practice and instant feedback than probably any other contemporary poet in the English language, and cannot crack the top million best-sellers on Amazon for either of his anthology books. Poetry is dead.
In the same way, you can't writing novels to reach a wide audience, because if you were trying to reach a wide audience, you wouldn't be writing novels. The novel, as an artform, is almost as dead as poetry. If you wanted to be popular and gain an audience for the purpose of slowly turning them right-wing, you'd be doing the kinds of things that make you popular and gain you an audience. You'd make speedrunning videos, earn five thousand dollars for a 90-second Manscaped advertisement, get acquired by Clover Talent, and (popularity mission accomplished) start slowly edging your audience rightward by refusing to take the Lord's name in vain, declaring "This is a Christian Minecraft server!" as a running gag enough times that your viewers start pretending to act Christian (as a joke), making analogies to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun when grinding for a Doom world record, and spending two and a half hours a day ruthlessly purging your Discord server of transvestite would-be moderators. And that's assuming that you don't just become The Catholic Thinker and review TV shows instead.
You're not in this for the popularity or the money. You have the option of trying to be a 'content creator' and honing your skills at appealing to a huge audience, and the option of trying to be an author and honing your skills at quality fiction-writing, and you've chosen the latter. This isn't a bad thing! But it becomes counterproductive to your goals if you mistake one for the other.
A decent number of people on the Right have reposted your stories on Twitter. Searching for 'Gigaheroes' on Twitter, I see dozens of people recommending your story, linking to it, and praising it. By contrast, I only see a couple people talking about specific story elements (one of whom was egged on by you to read it, and read it for the same reason Critical Drinker watches The Acolyte), and I see a grand total of one person on the Internet quoting any specific line from it. It's not that there are no discussions happening outside 'our' influence - it's that there's no discussions happening *inside* either. That's because 'we' - the small, highly focused group of people that are the future of Right art - are not focused on reading your work.
We don't want to punch right. We don't want to blow out your sparks before they have a chance to catch. We're focused on circling the wagons around our creators the same way the Left circles the wagons around theirs. You want the Right to stand by its authors the way the Left does; this is our best attempt at it. The Left promotes books that it doesn't actually read. So do we.
RW art is a totem, like Lucas says. Use the totem to your advantage. Pour your heart and soul into writing a novel, post about it, and get just enough encouragement from retweets and likes to keep going for the next novel. The speedrunner Wirtual said once that he spent ten thousand hours playing Trackmania because "Trackmania is the outlet for me to experience mastery". Make novel-writing *your* outlet for experiencing mastery. Become intimately familiar with the process. Learn *how* to master a craft. Get so good that occasional lines get shared without attribution, like screencaps of deleted Twitter accounts or 2013-era /pol/, in those occasional 'discussions outside our influence'. Write books that satisfy you, that you really think are first-class work, that let you experience the pride of workmanship and a job well done.
And if, after that, you still want popularity, then quit novel-writing and use what you've learned to do something else.
I think there is a level of separation from the article that needs to be addressed. I’m not putting myself forward as THE RW art scene. For quality over quantity, I’m more referring to the likes of Zero HP Lovecraft + people who have actually had real success with their fiction. While I’m not ashamed to put my stuff as an alternative, I also know I’m a very small fish in a very big pond. I have to brazen, otherwise I don’t get noticed at all.
I think audiobooks still have the potential for a mainstream audience—whatever that means in the current year.
I intended this article for a broad overview, trends I see happening over the coming decade. In a sense, Star Wars is already cringe to talk about. People don’t come to it with the same enthusiasm as they once did. I think that’s undeniable. I’m talking about an environment where that’s more pronounced. I want a point in the culture war where there is a real parallel structure to Hollywood that can create dividing lines of cultural consumption.
I think that popularity is very important. As you said yourself, Gigaheroes does not receive much in the way of critical feedback. And I don’t think it ever will. Excellent critique requires mainstream investment. We should strive for popularity as much as we can.
"I want a point in the culture war where there is a real parallel structure to Hollywood that can create dividing lines of cultural consumption."
We're definitely in agreement about that. The problem I see is that competing with Hollywood in movie against movie (e.g. Godzilla Minus One, Sound of Freedom) is very different than competing with Hollywood in movie against book. Casual audiences probably find movies fungible with each other to a degree. As you say, making our own movies is not in the cards right now, but until it is we can't *really* make a parallel structure to Hollywood.
Twitch and Instagram are fundamentally different than Hollywood in how they work; they've attracted a huge number of boys and girls respectively, and are almost certainly more of a cultural influence than movies to teenagers right now, but the Twitch streamers and Instagram flutterers didn't get there by thinking "I want to parallel Hollywood". It's the wrong mindset, and if they had thought that, they'd have failed at attracting their actual audience. And - though I can't find it at the moment - I think you wrote a piece saying almost exactly the same thing, somewhere.
We're probably 90% on the same page on this one.
I don’t want a parallel Hollywood per se, as in a one to one structure. I just want a nodes that serve as alternate creative hubs. I think recreating Hollywood is a mistake. I don’t think recreating its original functions is.
Back in the 1900s through the 1920s, the traditional plays and operas had gotten very stale on the American scene, and the parallel structure of vaudeville was opening up a scene much more in tune with what audiences actually wanted to watch. The vaudevillians went to radio almost as soon as radio became a big thing in the 1920s, and some of the remaining ones transitioned to TV in the 1950s, once that became practical. I wonder if that's the historical model we should be looking at. I wonder if Twitch is our vaudeville.
That's an interesting point; I forgot about audiobooks as an option.
By the way, thanks for all your feedback! If you have any more criticisms of Gigaheroes, I would love to hear them. I’m thick skinned enough to take a good licking ;)
My pleasure; I'm just trying to get in on the ground floor. Writing a 2000 word essay criticizing somebody else is a lot easier than writing 2000 words in an original work that somebody else might criticize...oh dear. I *am* becoming Critical Drinker.
Believe me, I would love a 2,000 word essay criticizing Gigaheroes
> I don’t expect the YouTube critic crowd to stop making videos slamming modern media. I think we are well past that opportunity now. But we must adopt a frame of fundamental disgust. Star Wars in its current iteration is to be spat upon. The thing you loved is long gone, and it’s been turned against you. I’m not suggesting feeding into outrage, but rather adopting an apathetic contempt. And that applies to everything mediocre or “good” Star Wars produces going forward.
People above 16 year old should not be watching Star Wars (old or new) in any case. That's another case of man-children culture... 20-somethings watched Casablanca or the Godfather or Taxi Driver or the Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction back in the day, now 30+ somethings line up for the 15th Star Wars movie.
There's always sci-fi books, or more mature sci-fi movies like Bladerunner if you want to have that space fix after teenhood.
I think I can sum up my thousands of words thus: we will only make art enjoyed by the general public after we make art that we enjoy amongst ourselves. If we’re having a good time, other people may want in on it; if we're not, they won't.