On the reverse of this, I never watched Sailor Moon as a kid, but I started watching it recently, Just to know what the hype was.

And y’know what? It’s a repetitive, incidentally pro-social, barely animated anime slop for little girls…

AND THAT’S WHY IT FUCKING RIPS!!! I adore that it looks like ass! The Japanese economy crashing after the consumer electronics boom went bust, meant that animation houses suddenly had way fewer resources to work with. So, they had to do everything they possibly could to cut corners, while still making something that, on some level, manages to be visually appealing.

Its not deep, but it’s dumb, and fun, and campy as hell!

Ok, but the theme song still slaps though.

But since the average USAan can only read at a 4th grade level, it’s also not surprising that they’re permanently locked into children’s media

I read a queer, middle grade, children’s novel recently, called Too Bright To See, and it was such a wonderful and evocative exploration of grief and self discovery.

Obviously it was written at a low lexical level, but these people aren’t even reading good quality children’s literature. They’re reading the lowest quality slop out there, not on its own merits, but because they’re blinded by their own nostalgia.

cartoons and comic books touch on serious themes all the time. boomers just think everything is silver-age schlock that they grew up with.

Everything has merch these days. It’s honestly such a weird thing to ask.

But the best I can figure is that this person warns somethng shareable or some sort of community from the product. Like part of the appeal for Potterverse people is that they can connect with a fandom that’s so widely recognized that there’s almost always another fan around. And merch becomes an easy way to identify and be identified as within a fandom.

I think this is the issue. HP is slop and it is ok to enjoy slop sometimes, but these people who have never read anything else in their lives act like it is the highest of high art and there would be no point reading anything else because they’ve already read the best.

That’s true and you’re correct, especially because Harry Potter is trash for a number of reasons. But I still find the whole idea ‘thing for adult only and thing for kid only’ confusing and frustraiting because there is plenty of media marketed as adult media that I find shallow and vapid, and there is plenty of media that appears childish that has more to it than on the surface. It sounds like marketing demographic jargon simililar to “This is for men, this is for women”. There seems to be mostly arbitrary rules involved that change with whatever social norms deem appropriate at the time. Maybe I’m just dumb or immature and will never get it, I don’t know.

there’s a little bit to general trends if you map it against economic conditions or major events. There’s a difference between those of us who remember 9/11 and all the horseshit that came in the years after and those who don’t. or the challenger disaster, or whether you were entering the job market in 2009 or during covid lockdowns or how established your life was in the 90s former soviet union

It’s 100% Minecraft. There are videos on youtube making entire movies / tv series inside the Minecraft engine. I would bet any amount of money that there will be a prestige Minecraft series on HBO (or its equivalent) within the next 30 years.

I would agree with that. But my criticism does not really come from a place of “childish equals bad,” but instead “capitalist IP exploitation = bad.” These people in the original post didn’t just read Harry Potter as a kid. They re-read it, watched the movies, bought the merch, went to the theme park, and are incredibly excited to re-watch the SAME story with worse directing so that HBO (Paramount) can make more money off their nostalgia.

There’s plenty of silly things I love, like early internet videos (Charlie the Unicorn / Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom ). But one of these original posters said “This is what sets Harry Potter apart from other books. You experience them differently at different ages.” Which is just false. MOST books, you see them differently at different ages. Romeo and Juliet is romantic when you’re young, frustrating when you’re old (they’re not really in love, they’re just horny).

Capitalism has taken these silly children’s books and made them into something bigger. The story is presented to us by advertisers in such a way that they almost seem like myths, and reading them has become a capitalist coming-of-age ritual. People are expected to recite their favorite Harry Potter quotes like Jewish kids reciting the Torah at their Bar-Mitzvah. Capitalism has dumbed down culture - I think that’s undeniable.

But there are very many books, tv shows, movies, video games, etc. that are UNMARKETABLE but still richly fulfilling. I read the Foundation series last year, and Asmiov (a socialist) basically ends it by turning the galaxy into a communist paradise (with a twist). The TV show, by Apple, removed the socialist elements from the books. Streaming sites will make steamy romances adapting or ripping off Jane Austin books, but never mention that Austin and her fellow upper-class elites had their lifestyles sustained by the Atlantic slave trade and exploitation of India.

So I agree, most people have a mix of tastes. It’s important to keep your inner child alive, even when you’re reading books about Stalin or digging into Thomas Pynchon. But capitalism has stolen the images and sounds of our childhoods and turned them into propaganda-filled dopamine traps. And the capitalist suppression of media with left-leaning themes does actively hurt the socialist movement in the west by limiting our imaginations.