When Nostalgia Becomes Toxic

one topic I'm sure we've all heard about no end in the last several years is Nostalgia it is an undeniable fact that we live in a media landscape clearly dominated by Nostalgia particularly in big budget Hollywood Productions new IPS and ideas fighting an uphill battle to get greenlit in numerous Industries because of the fact that executives are afraid of potential losses incurred trying to generate interest to something new shifting attention towards bringing back the same IPS we've all seen a billion times this gradual shift towards a culture of nostalgia has been going on for decades the pop culture boom of the 1980s being an interesting origin Point as countless new and iconic films and games were released but now we have movie sequel reboots remaking movies that already existed now analyzing how pop culture evolved in a way to where Nostalgia was such a powerful force isn't what I'm here for that's a subject someone else could cover in more depth than me instead I want to use the fact that we live in a media landscape dominated by Nostalgia as a springboard to discuss something specific Nostalgia doesn't just affect the things that get made and how they're made on the business end Nostalgia also plays a massive part in how the online discourse surrounding the these IPS plays out if you're unfamiliar this channel has largely dealt with popular franchises and media that is more often than not over 15 years old whether that be the DC Animated Universe cartoons the 2000s Ninja Turtles Star Wars Sonic the Hedgehog Mega Man Metal Gear Devil May Cry Resident Evil Sly Cooper Ratchet and Clank Jack and Daxter and so on I enjoy plenty of things that come out that are entirely removed from these nostalgic properties and thus I have noticed Trends in online discourse that I find unfortunate but also intergenerational so I'm here to discuss it as I've been involved with a lot of Internet communities this video is going to bounce between a bunch of different fan bases and franchises so be ready for that a lot of folks dismiss Nostalgia on principle I do get the idea since intentionally going backwards seems like just that however I think it's Case by case since I really like Nostalgia on average so despite Sonic being on the thumbnail this video is not about Green Hill Zone being overused but seriously though I remember being asked if I thought it was bad that Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 were NES throwback games I can expand on this when I eventually cover the classic Mega Man series but my answer was no in context it made a lot of sense gaming had done nothing but progressed forward for almost 40 years and in the late 2000s people had finally started to feel nostalgic for the old days of the NES and thus games like Mega Man 9 released hearkening back to that bygone age especially for Mega Man a series that was quite different in the 2000s in terms of how many sub-series as there were compared to the old days where it was just the NES games how it's done is a different discussion but I'm certainly okay with a game like this coming out to celebrate something old I also felt the time travel and Avengers end game was used to produce a lot of funny and also wholesome moments even using the least liked MCU material for that purpose so I'm saying that I'm not someone who is a new age purist or an old age purist I love old things I own every PlayStation console and enjoy playing games in their original Hardware whenever I can for that Nostalgia I mean you aren't getting the full experience of PS1 or PS2 without those boot up screens at the same time I think the current age of streaming TV has produced an age of absolutely fantastic drama and comedy the big TV dramas have been some of the best entertainment of the last 20 years or so and I think they only get better with the decade regardless of the fact that Hollywood is more concerned with churning out the same IP is over and over so there are good things going on and bad things like always so if I'm not here to argue that Nostalgia is bad on face value nor am I here to say it's not as it was back in my day what exactly is this dark side of nostalgia video based on well like I said being involved in the discourse of these valued nostalgic IPS I have noticed trends that are similar in communities all over the Internet trends that are centered on people's Nostalgia and their ability to relate to that Nostalgia and newer things that release it's wearying to see a lot of the same arguments and talking points that lack Nuance being endlessly recycled if you're a fan of the franchises I'm talking about just know I'm not talking about everybody so if you aren't guilty of the practices I'm about to speak on that don't feel called out as that's not what I'm going for I have plenty of positive interactions with the fans of these franchises and I'd be willing to bet that the positive outweighs the negative but since these Trends are so common I thought it was worth a video I want to talk about these Trends in a bullet point list using various examples so let's begin toxic Trend number one a rejection of modernity I think a lot of people had a phase being too good for all those new things that could never compare to the old this one is simple being a contrarian by hating new games and new movies and new shows oftentimes without having actually watched them or played them or whatever my favorite case study of this one is people who are Die Hard fans of PlayStation Platformers specifically these five Sly Cooper Jack and Daxter Ratchet and Clank Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon having spent a lot of time in the last eight years covering these things has meant I have been a witness to the exact same conversations over and and over again this is back when games were original and cool and fun and didn't hold your hand and the thing they were talking about is the Sly Cooper a franchise that literally holds your hand at every step of the way and requires almost no effort to platform around in because there's a land on platform for me button in every game The Sly Cooper Trilogy is one of my favorite things to ever exist so that's not a dig at it it is what it is a fun kids platformer and keeping that perspective in mind is important to me as it used to be lost on me as I'll say later in the video I see complaints from this crowd that the same games are oversaturated these days and 10 to 12 years ago I'd agree in the late seventh generation of consoles this is a fair statement the first person or third person shooter dominated the market no different to how Platformers did in the 80s and 90s especially but in the last several years I think the gaming industry has evolved to embrace genre variety big budget titles and different genres are coming out all the time horror games have made a comeback Platformers have had a comeback hack and slash games are thriving different art styles are being played around with in the last six years the variety in gaming has gone way up especially with the Indie scene being more mainstream hell in the last seven years there has been two Ratchet and Clank games both of which were best sellers and Crash Bandicoot was revived from the dead and got three games soon to be four and I never thought that was going to happen after his death in the late 2000s Spyro also got a Trilogy remake bringing the franchise's core DNA back after years of using the IP as a face to sell other things so with that being said it's clearly not that there isn't enough Variety in games like there were when these games were coming out you just want slide get the endless supply of sequels that Mario gets when I just don't think all franchises are created equal Sly just doesn't have the endless shelf life that Mario does the price to pay and telling an ongoing story this is what I was going to talk about in last week's video but I decided to cut it and save it for this video so having said that next case two an inability to engage with new and old media without it becoming a vapid comparison scroll down to the comments on any music video predating the year 2010 and I guarantee you odds increasing with each decade you go back you'll see a ton of comments are saying yeah this is the real music unlike that Eva evil new stuff as if we just reached this crosswalk of Doom where everything suddenly became bad when I talked about the 2003 TMNT series you'll notice that I focused exclusively on what I liked about the show itself and the things that made it good also focusing on things that did differently the previous versions oftentimes in my opinion improvements on what came before because when researching it those were the areas the team was trying to do well when conceptualizing it that's something I wanted to highlight but then in the discourse surrounding it I see a lot of kids today have no idea the crap they're getting these were the real turtles this generation is too soft and things of that nature here's the problem magically every generation seems to believe that this happened and they can't all be right which leads to one obvious conclusion the idea that there is a line to draw between things being good or bad and a line between us all being tough and built different and going too soft simply doesn't exist since the lines are only drawn to people nostalgic for something old which leads to problem three yeah but I'm right this is basically what it's like when you bring up the the fact that 80s Turtles fans thought the exact same thing regarding the 2000 series that those fans now feeling about new things the show was too dark too serious too edgy too mopey too emo not the real turtles what's the difference you're right why is the older generation wrong it's the exact same argument this is why I try to remain as consistent as possible for example when my Turtles Forever review I criticized the depictions of the 1987 turtles because it was not an accurate representation of what the show was like it was a parody of them disguised as a tribute I was born in 2000 so obviously I have no strong connection to the original cartoon especially in comparison to the 2003 Series so as a fan of that I also had issues with Turtles forever but I remember someone saying to me that they weren't bothered by the 80s team being poorly represented because there's been enough 80s Nostalgia or something and I'm thinking that's just not being consistent because if we're going to be upset by the things we like are poorly represented then all of things being poorly represented are worthy of criticism no greater example of this kind of thinking than in Star Wars the Disney age of Star Wars has been criticized to Kingdom Come for destroying the IP beyond recognition I can't help but get deja vu from when before that the prequels were the most hated thing in pop culture history I don't mean the most hated Star Wars thing I mean the most hated thing in pop culture history is jar jar lame in fact if you turn the clock back 11 years Disney's buyout of lucasfilm was widely celebrated as people thought the prequel era of Star Wars was that bad yeah but the people who are mad at the prequels were wrong though I am right in hating the new stuff and look my point isn't even that one is better than the other I think the rise of Skywalker is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life the kind of movie that I felt a profound sense of embarrassment while watching the one time that I did that is but my point is can't there be some kind of Middle Ground between between one side being the worst thing ever and the other being the same or one side being amazing 10 out of 10 in hindsight and the other is just the worst can't it be true that the prequels are easy to appreciate in hindsight because of the fact that they told a coherent story with grand ideas applicable to the politics of the time they were released and today and other interesting ideas about attachment and love were also being incredibly dated visually and having really still to dialogue and acting due to the script itself and the sterile environments it was shot in as a result of the Revolutionary technology while it is also true that the newer stuff had everything going for in terms of mixing practical and special effects All-Star casting and more believable acting while also being one of the worst managed projects in film history producing a completely incoherent story where each part of it is worse now that it's over can't it be true that good and bad things have been released in all these eras and decades rather than one Camp being all good or all bad and that no matter what side you fall on sending death threats to the people who work on Star Wars is unacceptable garbage as freaks did this to the cast and approved from the prequels and freaks have continued this behavioral Trend into the Disney era you might wonder why am I speaking about this like I'm some kind of wise Sage divorced from all bias answer is I really am not everyone is biased to some degree but I'm speaking about this because I want to show off how these arguments lack Nuance because of the fact that I myself was once as guilty of it as you could get I remember when The Last of Us was revealed in December of 2011. I was Furious oh great now I dog just wasted several years in that lame Uncharted instead of doing more Jack and Daxter as if that wasn't bad enough we're now getting another realistic shooter clearly I was ahead of my time in the hating the last of us about having played at industry as I continued that bias against the game even after becoming an Uncharted fan amazing what trying things will do for you I still had a resentment against this game I never played and now look at me ever since I played it in 2014 The Last of Us has remained my favorite game of all time and now eight years later it's one of my favorite franchises of all time the HBO series has been an absolute Banger thus far but I chose to hate it because I wasn't getting what I wanted which goes back to issue one from a few minutes ago of course you don't even have to go back that far as one of my most popular videos pretty much is a back in my day kind of thing oh and speaking of Sonic Issue 4 warping reality to suit your narrative the darkest depths of the Sonic Community is entrenched in an endless era War fighting to prove which decade of Sonic was the best the most interesting thing to come out of this would be how many people are okay warping reality itself to make your opinions more valid here's how I have gotten a shocking amount of pushback from 2 000 Sonic fans every single time I say that Sega tanked The credibility of Sonic back in the 2000s with rushed games of varying degrees of compromised quality and that Sonic Colors saved the series from those games and that generation cemented it only for Sega to kill it again with rise of lyric in 2014 but that's a separate problem thing is for people who despise the 2010 Sonic with all their might hearing Sonic Colors saved the series from the likes of Unleashed and black knight is enough to inspire comments about how colors always sucked and ruined the series sales tanking after colors yada yada yada just nonsense also a high amount of people have thought this meant I don't like Unleashed when they hear this without the full context I had never said that I think Unleashed and colors are both fun games for similar and different reasons look the fact is Unleashed in Black Knight were poorly received games Sonic Colors was not that and that is how Sonic color is defined the next several years of Sonic this is basic stuff when we start working with the revisionism that Generations was actually a bad and damaging title unlike Unleashed in Black Knight you have lost me the Sonic Community has been trapped by cycles of things for ages and the way to make it stop is to just hear different perspectives Spider-Man movie fans are guilty of this same kind of infighting and gatekeeping as well when I reviewed Sonic forces a few months back I went over the fact that some people in my comments have treated it like some kind of threat that the kids who grew up with the newer games I didn't like such as boom or forces were going to grow up and make their own videos as if that's something I should be afraid of I have a right to an opinion and so do they life is far too short to spend it being angry that in 10 years someone will talk about why they like something I didn't but in the comments a couple people said something of the effect of we end the cycle by not giving people who like a game as bad as forces the platform to talk about it which is absolutely not what I was saying my point was obsessing over negativity was bad and that I don't care if people liked the game I just didn't and I had my reasons why entirely divorced from silly Nostalgia Wars as most of the video was spent comparing it to Unleashed colors and generations two of which I'm ideologically supposed to hate apparently I'm not saying you can't hold opinions different from the majority if you don't like Sonic Colors more power to you if you think Sly Cooper is goaded and The Last of Us sucks agree to disagree I guess I liked both The Last of Us won and slide 2 being my two favorite games of all time if you gave them all a fair and honest chance then you can feel however you want we can have a neutral discussion about it because there are people in real life that I talk to who I don't have the same video game opinions as and it's a fine and normal conversation because it's a really unimportant thing at the end of the day but when we deal with alternative facts about Sly Cooper totally being a mega hit waiting to happen compared to those games that keep coming out for are some mysterious and unknown reason I just want to disengage because I smell Nostalgia bias in the air Issue 5 misunderstanding the thing you like to a shocking degree even years later here are some good examples Sly Cooper this one's come up a lot in the video I realize Sly 3 gave us an ending to the story of these characters realizing that life offered more than what they had and that there was a strength in moving forward and finding new things not because you hate what came before but because you can stagnate by doing the same thing forever the spirit of the developer making the game which I think bled into every aspect of Sly 3's narrative something I never realized as a kid because that's such a nuanced idea in a kid's game but then I just never accepted it after the sequel was released as I just kept going on and on about how much I hated it while people also get their hopes up year after year for Sly 5 leaks less and less each time to be fair when it's in the community's best interest to just accept what we have and enjoy it for what it is I did mean every year by the way this Infamous image is literally from 2013. another great case study is how how Teen Titans infamously ended on this episode where Tara was seemingly back from the dead and Beast Boy wants to get to the bottom of it over helping the other Titans with some new monster of the week the episode ended with no answers really given on what was going on naturally the fan base wanted to see season 6 for years but the cast and crew knew going into it that there was never going to be a season six this was intentionally the ending there is no Cliffhanger maybe you don't get it when the episode came out back in 2006 I mean I was five when the episode premiered but that's okay it's looking back on it with an adult lens that allows you to see what they were truly going for and failing that you could just listen to the people who made it here's Kari Payton the voice of cyborg we wanted to do a season six you know we wanted to explore you know uh you know Starfire's kind of kind of personal Journey kind of the way that everybody else had but um but it wasn't in the college course and so we were and so we thought to ourselves what is a teenager's last lesson you know uh since we're I mean this is Teen Titans this is the end of the road this is kind of graduation in a way so so what is the last thing that we all learn as teenagers and and uh and we're we're thinking about high school you graduate and they're friends that you that you uh that you had that you had all your life and you uh and you become very close to and then for whatever reason the relationship doesn't go the way that you think and you never see these people there's somebody that you thought that you'd be friends forever and you'd never see them again and uh and maybe there was something that that uh there's some closure that you wanted but you know what life doesn't work that way you know once you become an adult life doesn't work that way and sometimes you just gotta learn to move on for more information you can watch the video my friends at the Watchtower database did on the subject it was really good having now lived past the age he was talking about in that clip I totally get it in life things change and it's okay and not everything gets wrapped up into a neat little bow you keep going on for the things you do have in life not chasing the things you don't things change people change often without explanation and we aren't owed one either this issue is minor compared to the other ones because if you remember Teen Titans ending on a cliffhanger because you haven't seen it in 15 years that's fine it's not like I expect everyone in the world to have seen the clip I just played but the problem with ignorance and never having reached a deeper understanding of these nostalgic things is issue six obsessing over hating this one might be the biggest issue of them all all the previous ones are matters of opinion and if you're minding your own business they're all just pet peeves of mine from a vocal minority not a serious issue but it was all leading to this I just find it depressing how obsessed people are with hating things they don't like and usually haven't even seen here's an example I love the Ninja Turtle social media they do fun posts all the time and celebrate the most ridiculous of TMNT media like the anniversary post.tmnt3 a movie that is almost universally panned the social media page frequently pays homage to the entire history of the brand as one turtle from each of the four cartoons is the banner however there are these idiot weirdos who camp out in every single post they do that acknowledges rise of the TMNT to tell the world how bad rise is and how much they wish it wasn't there for a little reason other than it's different and therefore ruined as if there aren't a million incarnations of the TMNT that are more your speed and I doubt they've ever seen it to begin with I mean but I can't prove that this is how earlier issues compound now if you're obsessed with the back in my day thinking this is the only end point spending your valuable time and life hating things that are not made for you and never work it twists Your Love of your childhood things into hate of new things and it's sad to watch something I've been guilty of for years with Sly 4 for example more information in the previous video if you want to hear about it these are the same kinds of people who have been hate watching Teen Titans Go for 10 years 10 years season 6 hasn't been taken away by go it's just a goofy parody of the OG series the show you can buy on Blu-ray that is going nowhere people like this get made fun of in the show and still don't get it if the things surrounding that which you will supposedly like make you this upset set it's time to log off so here's my point in all this I love Nostalgia I really do and that's what I was saying at the beginning of the video as well but when Nostalgia has turned from a love and appreciation of the past into a spiral of hate on things that are new I think people do themselves a disservice it's a path of resentment and negativity as well as making you become more insulated and stubborn dismissing new things out of hand you can like or dislike whatever you want I have to restate that because it's true things that suck based on Old IPS come out all the time I just don't watch them because I don't really give a damn if you believe rise of the TMNT is bad and have reasons why Beyond it not being what you're used to and don't go around being a miserable weirdo about it fine you're entitled to your own opinion as am I I just hope that people can still appreciate the things they loved as a kid for intrinsic reasons Beyond it not being the new thing and I also think there is strength in letting the things you loved as a kid move on without you it's okay I've never seen rise of the TMNT because for me I've already got a version I go back to but for the kids of the late 2010s they decided to do something different and a lot of people really dig it who am I to make a scene about it I already went through that when the 2012 version came out and I watched a couple episodes of it and I decided I hated it because it wasn't the 2003 version now I'll give my opinions on things I like and didn't like from doing a video on something new like say Sonic Frontiers but it doesn't live in my mind rent free I just focus on the things that I like which is out there in Spades as there are just so many great shows to be invested in in games to play and I hope through this ramble maybe somebody has learned something or seen things from a different perspective as again this isn't a large issue in the global scale it really is just something I notice over and over in different internet communities and I wanted to speak on it but that's pretty much all from me today so I'll now say what I always do at the end of the video thank you all for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: J's Reviews

Views: 192,606

Keywords: nostalgia, tmnt, tmnt (film), 2003 tmnt, tmnt movie, tmnt 2003, rotmnt, 2012 tmnt, rise of the tmnt, sonic, sonic the hedgehog, sonic prime, 2d sonic, sonic boom, sonic frontiers, teen titans go, teen titans go!, teen titans go cartoon network, teen titans, teen titans go vs teen titans, sly cooper, sly cooper thieves in time, sly 4, sly 2, star wars, disney star wars, star wars disney, lucasfilm star wars, disney buys star wars, disneys star wars land

Id: d75Fu_uJKvg

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023