Who here is currently anxious and scared of the future? - The Sequel

[IssunBoshi]

Okay so this is the real thread

((WARNING: Big Wall of Text Ahead - Spanning Three Posts - Still Under Construction))

Well it's been 3 years and counting since I have created this previous thread: http://forums.comicbookresources.com...ure&highlight=

In the previous thread, I was mostly concerned with famous iconic media franchises that has given happiness and joy to everyone in america/the world such as superman, mickey mouse, bugs bunny, etc. ending for good eventually and how the 2000's decade was going to end, but this time it was something even far bigger.

Now the first three years of this century's second decade is about to pass (or deep down has passed already) and I must say I've had many moments that were great and epic or bittersweet and had been open to so many wonderful and awesome things, both old and new alike, and had grown in many significant ways but at the same time have been through numerous and nearly life-turning occasions, phases, and periods that have been disastrous, disappointing, sad, outrageous, shocking, depressing, and just plain shitty yet even sadly they are most likely far from being anywhere near the worst of times I will possibly be facing for the rest of this decade and far beyond.
2012 has been the most significant, expansive, and changing year in my life and I have never felt such a year since 2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010 and I can't believe it's almost ending for 2013 (which means the Mayan End-Time Prophecy fiasco is going to be all gone and i'm going to wait for another popularly theorized or speculated "end-time" date to cling onto). Everything just seems to be aging too fast.

And I never quite thought I would be making a sequel to my previous thread until later this year and boy... I've gotta say this part of the year kinda feels like 2009 and 2011 all over again. And this thread is basically the last thread linked above, only cranked up to eleven. And I've got SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much more stuff to let off my chest this time that I don't know where the bleeding hell to start. So here goes... *clears throat*

First off... the one thing that worries and pesters me most right now are Future Generations either on the internet or in real-life. As you can see I've been a daily internet user since no earlier than late 2003 and I've been a member of Comic Book Rumbles (and this board as a whole) for 3 years now and I have been through various sorts of things during my stay and saw at least several epic moments and seen many noobs pop up and saw some of them become regulars. But I notice that when I first joined, I was expecting a lot of things to be the same as it was back in like 2004-2008 such as certain characters being loved and dominating in their fights, but was kinda shocked to see that things have changed more drastically than I thought. And then it came to me that the senior/older posters that used to post there and that made such wonderful past threads for me to read upon, rarely or no longer posted anymore and thus the good things and familiar attitudes I have thought would stay seemed to have faded away.

For most of my whole life, I've grew up feeling that it is usually the older people who are more experienced and have more treasured wisdom, knowledge, and intellect than me and people my age. And it's just that whenever I see stances and opinions on religion Gods's scope/power, omnipotence, toonforce, who's verses top-tiers are stronger, no-limits-fallacy, etc. and some stuff not related to battles between fictional characters, i feel more inclined to take an older person's words (unless I completely disagree with them from the start) more seriously than I would from someone who's at least 2-3 years younger than me and dismiss the latter as just young ignorant people.

But I feel that when I get older that I will have less and less awesome and wise elderly or older people (and more and more annoying and obnoxious uncultured younger people) to always easily look up to for advice and comfort like I have now and the years before in my life and thus I feel like I'm not only relatively lonely in that scenario, but mentally and psychologically trapped, alienated, and helpless (like i'm stuck in a steel box with no way out). This is why i keep looking up to God, real gods/beings, ancient/classic/traditional stuff, historical figures, older actors/actresses/celebrities (both living and dead), etc. more and more these days, even as I'm now a young adult who's just reached 21 a few months ago.

This sort of mentality of mine you could say, all started with the history and looks of video gaming for the rise of this mentality... when I grew up in my childhood decade of the early to mid 1990's, video gaming was primarily 16/8-bit and mario/nintendo and other classic games were the most popular and praised and they were the center of all gaming and back then gaming was much more colorful and appealed to ALL ages (i don't want to use the word "kiddy" or "children's stuff", it's too derogatory, elitist, and condescending) and back then most people respected the quality, fun, and colorfulness of games over mere graphics, age-ratings, or blood/violence/sex and not to mention whenever you think of video gaming, names like "Nintendo" were basically a pre-requisite and mandatory thing to know and embrace when being a gamer. And I always expected whenever people mention the word "video games", I always think of classic and traditional ones like Atari, Nintendo, Namco, etc., arcade machines, and joypads and other 8-bit/16-bit or cartoony stuff instead of the more modern gritty realistic 3D crap like xbox or halo/call of duty (blech).

But ever since no later than 2001, video gaming has changed drastically from the classic and traditional look and feel of my childhoods and even worse, when I was still a child at that time, while I have been a loyal Nintendo fan all my life and always have grew up seeing it as not only THE real classic or eternal definition of video gaming alongside Atari, Namco, etc., I always had to put up with the constant annoyance, confusion, and frustration of Playstation/Sony fanboys or more new/current-gen gamers from my generation's time (mostly primarily the early to mid 2000's until high school started for me) not only openly mocking and blatantly disrespecting Nintendo consoles/characters and pejoratively labelling them as "kiddy" and "outdated", but were more often than not pretty ignorant of the fact that Nintendo saved the video gaming industry and that without Mario/Nintendo, there would be no more video gaming (at least in the West) and the only video game characters we would have are pac-man and whoever's before him in the atari/coleco ages.

It's like during the early 2000's and late 1990's, everyone knows what a SNES and N64 is, but as of right now, for people born in like the 2000's and 2010's, I feel kinda unsettled being with a massive group of younger people than me (who may or may not look like teens or even young adults) that have no basic knowledge or idea of what an NES, SNES, N64, or even Gamecube is and who Mario/Nintendo is and all the classic pre-2000's video game characters and even moreso verbally desecrate them for being "primitive", "kiddy", and "boring". It's kinda like kids who are going to be born in the 2020's and future decades are going to take A LOT of time to get familiar with the 1950's or even 1990's. I just hate to be in a time in the future like the 2050's where I have to put up with younger kids going "1980's are boring" and "1920's is creepy black-and-white" when I look back into all the wonderful decades of the 20th century and the early 21st as well (which is another thing i'm going to be discussing in the second post).

It seems the originals just get ignorantly and blindly disrespected and underrated by the younger generations as if they were trash like "naruto" or "bleach", or maybe that's just how I grew up in the past as a 90's child and fear how that part of my life's history might be repeated and even worse amped (despite being exposed to enough real gamers, both old and young, who know shit about nintendo's history). I could go on and on...

It's one of the reasons why younger people annoy the hell out of me when it comes to these particular subjects and matters.

Second issue coming in the second post...

[thwhtGuardian]

This seems like a total non-issue to me.

Being anxious about the future of the economy, if you'll ever get a job that will allow you to support a family? Yeah, I get that. But getting bothered that pop culture changes over time? That just seems like an odd thing to fixate on.

[IssunBoshi]

^ Well to be honest, I was working on making this thread since the past week already, but the only reason I didn't make it any sooner is because I was clogged up with work, tests, and other college stuff and a lot of depressing issues about what I think of the future and stuff.

I'll be around the second post once I'm done with my other work tonight.

[chicainery]

It's like during the early 2000's and late 1990's, everyone knows what a SNES and N64 is, but as of right now, for people born in like the 2000's and 2010's, I feel kinda unsettled being with a massive group of younger people than me (who may or may not look like teens or even young adults) that have no basic knowledge or idea of what an NES, SNES, N64, or even Gamecube is and who Mario/Nintendo is

This all is ridiculous and you sound crazily paranoid over trivial "worries", but I will comment on this part:

1. The Nintendo wii sold a bunch of units. People know Nintendo.

2. As long as Nintendo is in business there will be access to all of the classic Mario games.

3. Who do you talk to that doesn't know who Mario is? My 2 year old daughter knows who Mario is. We just played Super Smash Bros. Brawl together for the first time today.

4. Maybe the History Channel can do a show on the history of video games so you can record it for future generations.

[Paradox]

Things pass. Things change. The older you get, the more you see that things are not static. Get over it. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome!

[IssunBoshi]

Now for the second issue: Classics vs. Modern, Old vs. New, AND How the Quality of New/Modern Stuff May Be Affected By Future Generations With Radically Different Tastes And Attitudes

Yes I will admit... most of us always prefer the classics and old over the modern and new in every category possible and champion them as the greatest of the great and I think that's practically a fact, BUT at the same time we want to have new stuff as well (if at least only to add more numbers to the classics or what we would call the "good old" stuff or have more greater fun and open up our horizons), although from all our experiences growing out of childhood, we tend to have an automatic habit for criticizing and hating/disliking them as there are pretty often many many many times when we consider them crappy or inferior in quality to the grand classic and familiar stuff we love more than anything else. This is without question.

But in all fairness, if any said new stuff are proven to be awesome/good in our eyes, depending on our tastes/preferences, we want more of them as much as possible and weed out every crappy crap stuff of course and this is also pretty common as well, but if there's anything I sometimes fear or worry about THE most right now, it's how much the way they're going to be made will drastically change and more specifically i do mean it when most younger people than us are going to replace the older (and especially awesome and good) artists, writers, poets, directors, actors/actresses, singers, musicians, etc. that we all grew up with and idolized/championed such as Frank Sinatra (even though he's dead now), Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Don Bluth, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Spice Girls, Robin Williams, the list goes on and on... and not only that, but without the basic or developed knowledge/taste of the older generation's styles and cultures they grew up in, make said new/modern works and stuff even worse and crappier for us old people and stuff.

Now how did this worry all start for me you ask?

Let's just say long story short: When we were little, we always enjoyed our favorite characters, series, fictions, or things of any sort and 99% of the time they were made by adults (or anyone at least a decade older than us) and we always treated legendary or great stuff like: mickey mouse, bugs bunny, superman, batman, the hulk, any disney feature film, tom & jerry, other marvel/dc comics supeheroes, archie comics, cartoon network shows, lord of the rings, chronicles of narnia, conan the barbarian, robocop, terminator, back to the future, adventure time, amazing world of gumball, regular show, etc. as stuff that could pass for something so good and sacred that could only be created/given by God, the gods, and forces of nature/destiny beyond human control and even comprehension and by extension put into the minds of mere human beings like us to make those works very much like how in Judeo-Christian beliefs of how God inspired humans from ancient times to write the Bible.

But when we were little, we never really expected or even thought about how some of the future artists/directors/writers/etc. like the people we idolized in our times and our parent's time, could be US, as in people whom we personally know each other either in real-life or an internet forum who are 95% pretty much just average nobodies seeking fictions and things to sit back and enjoy and appreciate like me.

And moreso, it also has to do with the years I spent on the CBR, OBD, and other versus/debate forums in general, where all the fictional universes/characters we use in debates are all stuff that's pretty much published by adults older than our generation. I mean when when someone makes a thread about "insert verse or char vs. the rest of fiction", I think by fiction, in the narrower sense, people will usually mean or assume primarily if not exclusively published/known/main/authentic/legit/canon series that are officially recorded and existing in the list of the OBD/any versus forum it's in... which means fan-fiction characters or blatantly non-canon/randomly-imagined-at-the-moment creations DO NOT count at all and will be treated or seen as 100% non-existent within the confines of said thread or any related debate/discussion at hand.

Same goes for OOC's or original fictional stories/characters/creations made up by any random OBD'r or relatively underaged people with zero profession that is currently by default unpublished, unauthorized, or uncreated and with any lack of proof declaring otherwise.

My point regardless is that I tend to enjoy only series/characters/fictions that are officially published, canon, or at least legit/authentic and made known in media/pop culture and tend to treat original stories/stuff made by average people on the internet like my friends and this person who used to be another internet friend of mine but I got bored and tired of her and left her alone since 2009 (http://zabysmind.tumblr.com/) at the same level as fan-fiction and find fan-fiction-like stuff to be boring and mediocre. And I feel like when I grow old into my 30's and beyond, I'm going to be starting to see authors/directors/other people far younger than me creating all these series/characters and stuff for us to enjoy and from my current perspective I feel like it's something i'm going to have to get used to and I can only hope they don't make said works crappier and garbage-y than all the stuff I loved and enjoyed from my childhood's generation and every generations before that and that if I become open-minded and adjusted enough, they could make more awesome and quality works in the same path and style as my childhood and the older generations obviously. Cause I don't want to find myself in 2050 or 2100 going over the past decades of the 20th and 21st century like the 1950's, 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, and feel like going along the lines of "man people back in my days made more awesome and quality stuff than right now and right now sucks beyond redemption...".

I mean most of the people reading this forum or posting in this forum are probably much older than me, like in their 20's, 30's, 40's, or even older. And I do notice that they're currently enjoying whatever stuff they prefer created by artists/writers/directors/etc. younger than their generation and I'm rather eager to know how they got through the transition from when they were used to enjoying fictions/works created by their elders TO a decade where they're enjoying works both made by their elders and youngers and soon mostly if not only the youngers. And most of all, have any of you older people first found it creepy that you find some new gorgeous supermodel you think is hot and sexy is like at least 5 or 10-20 years younger than you and you feel creepy for feeling in love with her?

Most of all, I feel like what if in the distant future from when i'm still reading this thread or posting on this board (if it'd even still exist), and then suddenly all the senior members older than me were not around anymore to have fun talking to and I have only 99% of annoying or idiotic noobish people like 10-30 years younger than me to give me their "advice" or thoughts. The thought of it is kinda scary and depressing.

I could go on and on... but i'm tired now.

[IssunBoshi]

Tl;dr version: We always love old over new and try to find the GOOD new stuff and often do, but the chances are not always high. But the worst part is... what if future artists/people younger than us started to replace all the older good people and made works far subpar and inferior to them in quality (it's times like this where I wished all the countless old famous people of our childhoods and before could still make more awesome or good stuff, old and new, from the dead). And I don't feel like accepting series/fictions made only by friends or average nobodies of my time and tend to treat it like fan-fiction and would rather stick to the more famous people that I never met in person (regardless of age).

and i worry what will i do if all the old people that i look up to and talk to are no longer here on this board and are only replaced by annoying and stupider younger people. @_@

[Paradox]

Stop using "we" in your personal POV. It's annoying.

[Winslow]

The old stuff will always be available. Just this year I read 100 year old pulp fiction by E.R. Borroughs and 80 year old pulp fiction by Robert E. Howard. I doubt that's going anywhere.

Perhaps you are using hyperbole or overstating your reactions, but it's not normal to have this kind of emotional attachment to entertainment or comic book message boards. You might want to consider counseling. No snark or sarcasm, if your reactions described are sincere, then you need help.

[Michael P]

The nice thing about the future is, it never actually gets here.

[Michael P]

Wait, THIS is what you're worried about? That pop culture will change?

Well, let me help you: (A) It's gonna change no matter what, so no use worrying about it, and (B) there's plenty of stuff that's actually important to worry about.

[Paradox]

Yup, he's been on about this for a couple of years. I think Winslow may be right, although I still subscribe to the "you'll grow out of it, get over it" school.

[Dizzy D]

Yup, he's been on about this for a couple of years. I think Winslow may be right, although I still subscribe to the "you'll grow out of it, get over it" school.

I think this'll be more a case of "Damn kids, in my time we had *REAL* [insert aspect of culture here]" school.

[thwhtGuardian]

Wait, THIS is what you're worried about? That pop culture will change?

Well, let me help you: (A) It's gonna change no matter what, so no use worrying about it, and (B) there's plenty of stuff that's actually important to worry about.

That's what I said after his first part but this part was even sillier.

[Mormel]

I recently came across this video. I think this guy hits the point pretty well, even though he goes off on tangents. While he speaks primarily about cartoons, I think it can be applied to comic books and video games as well, given the fickle nature of these pop cultural phenomena. For all you Yanks, there's some mild swearing.





Just replace the 'shyt' with 'mediocre' where you please.


I agree with Winslow when it comes to overstating the 'danger' of pulp fiction and light entertainment disappearing into oblivion. I also think you should remember that quite a bunch of pop cultural 'classics' were made by so-called fanboys and -girls, and may thus be seen as originating as a form of 'fan fiction'. Star Wars? Fanboy stuff, borrows a page from the movie Dambusters, among other things. Roy Thomas run on Avengers? Fanboy stuff, was the first writer to land a job at Marvel who had grown up reading the books. Neon Genesis Evangelion? Took elements from Anno's favourite giant mecha shows, deconstructed them, and went on to become a standard of giant mecha anime in its own right. The Matrix? Borrowed heavily from Ghost In The Shell.

See pop culture, like art in general, has in significant part always looked back to its predecessors and used and modified stylistic elements and tropes into a new mould. Would there have been a Lady Gaga in her current form if it hadn't been for Madonna and Bowie? Would Madonna's image have been the same if it had not been for Marilyn Monroe?

Why you would worry about the current generation of upstart whippersnappers not being able to cut the job of producing quality films, comics, or video games, kind of escapes me. Just find the stuff you enjoy, and stick with it, because it might need your support.