Badweatherbartender

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

Tony: 50 bucks says I can make Steve blush like a schoolgirl

Bucky: Is this how you became a billionaire, Stark? By charging people for shit you were gonna do anyway?

Tony: …

Tony: I mean, you’re not wrong…

love snarky daud who does not give a fuck that his whalegod patron has a favourite human pet, all he really wants is for the black-eyed bastard to fucking ADMIT it already

FedEx: shits on my box, stomps on my box, kicks it, dumps gasoline on it, throws one of my chickens into the back of the van UPS: whispers at my front door “is anyone home” as quietly as possible before leaving a “we missed you!” note, tries to gaslight me into thinking my address doesn’t exist USPS: sets my package down gently where it’s not visible from the road, knocks on the door and kisses me directly on the mouth

Sometimes I think about how and why some people had such a *bad* reaction to the end of Steven Universe, specifically in regards to the Diamonds living.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff. (edit: yes, cliff then hyenas. But cliff first. Lol.)

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took a step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

It also reminds me of the folks who get very weird about Aang not killing Ozai at the end of Avatar. And like, Ozai still gets chucked in prison, so it doesn't even push back on our cultural ideas of punitive justice *that much.* and still, I've seen people get real mad that the child monk who is the last survivor of a genocide that wiped out his entire pacifist culture didn't do a murder.

You cannot look me in my eyeballs and tell me "The series really picks up in the fifth book and then they're all bangers, you should try them." I AM NOT READING FOUR SHITTY BOOKS FIRST. WHO HAS THE TIME.

Me: I am a relatively smart, capable, mature human being. I can figure things out.

Also Me: *frantically FaceTiming my sister for help so I don’t have to tell the lady I’m babysitting for that I don’t know how to use child-proofed doorknobs*

humans are a subspecies of elf known for dying really quickly and being stressed the whole time

when you dive headfirst into an old fandom again but its a decade old so there’s not enough new content to feed you