working on children's media has gotta be fuckin wild dude you crunch to death for shit wages making animated corporate sludge to sell products to nine-year-olds and thirty years later it turns out you accidentally forged a bone-deep emotional totem for an entire generation
It's sorta funny, this post has me thinking about how aggressively I'm on about Death of the Artist and post media interpretations. Post media as in, after the media is past its immediate relevance. I don't think that's a term, Media Studies people please shout creative dinosaur slurs at me if there's a word for it.
Anyway, I used to love a lot of different things but quickly found the media itself to completely depart from my own vision or otherwise ruin itself. I wanna say the first case of this to my memory was the stagnation of Starfox 64 and the passing of Vigilante 8. I first comprehended the idea of critical media analysis and separating myself from a piece of media when Rogue Squadron 2 released, and literally put me in the pilot seat as my favorite characters... and it felt very weird. Media existed outside of my internal landscape, it was as disconnected from me as anything else.
Not long after the Gamecube Era, maybe circa 2004, I would obtain dad's work laptop from him and get the famous Starcraft Broodwar Battlechest. A friend of mine had known I loved Warcraft II Beyond the Dark Portal, so it was a natural fit as a frankly epic and life-changing piece of media to gift. The custom scenario editor in Starcraft Broodwar saw me making my own cringe fanfiction campaign missions around a Devouring One zergling named Rex. Upon interacting with my own media that hollowly recreated Silent Cartographer from Halo 1 and other Scifi-game inspired scenes, I ended up making my own original story. That would escalate into my first fan character, who by now is their entire own thing after I "divorced" the Starcraft IP in 2017.
Critical between 2004 and 2017 is 13 years of watching every single IP I invested myself into get utterly crunched underfoot by corporate greed, and the firing or replacement of key creative talents and writers. Star Wars, Halo, Warcraft, Starcraft, Fallout, and Mass Effect all met their ends by various means. I had a phase where I tried to get into the meta-game of Pokemon's 4th generation, only to realize it was pointless because by the time I was any good, generation 5 released and it completely threw out the team I made. In the now inescapable titanic trilogies being pushed out constantly in games and movies and even some TV shows, everyone around me was being enriched by fictional media. I was getting further and further dejected. Queer identities and importantly non-human characters were harder and harder to find as protagonists, worse than it seemed before.
What made things click for me was that space between events, the undocumented void after a story wraps up, or endings left open for interpretation. But most of the stories that did this had complete arcs and satisfying endings, or were such letdowns and obvious sequel bait that it never appealed. More-over, short brown hair straight white guy protagonist was an absolute plague, replaced only marginally with the "dad" trend we had for a little while. By the time 2017 had happened, I went through college, got a "real" job, had a patient of mine die after an insurance denial, and was seriously fed up with nostalgia and half-remembered gap filling. Interrogating old media was part of some soul searching around then, but something I kept coming back to was how things had changed yet again, and my desires simply had not. These days, what keeps me going is my own little worldbuilding and my own original stories. The more fucked my health gets, the more critical this has been for my morale, but it also has gotten substantially harder.
I pivoted to slash fiction style writing thanks to this account and the Cohost "A who <action/description>" style blogs. I'm too description and internal monologue heavy, and still can't write natural character conversation to save my life; but it's mine, not someone else's, and that's the lesson I learned from watching my uh, Media Cohort crash and burn at the hands of excessive profit seeking and serial product releases. I still think about my own little worlds constantly, and try to fight my narcolepsy and intersex related problems in any little way that I can to make shit, but it's such a battle.
I experience more emotions from people telling their personal, real stories of real suffering. I'm moved by accounts of building collapses, amputations, footage of combat... fiction serves as this weird thing in which I look for things to process these raw feelings and find almost nothing I can engage with. Maybe it's that fact, the knowledge of the behind the scenes that makes media, media that should move me, instead give me pause. The reality of the sausage being made is worth my consideration, and to me is often more intense and emotional to hear about than the actual media itself. To get an idea of this, I'd recommend watching the Doublefine Documentary about Psychonauts 2. I feel more emotion over how Geoff pronounces their name than I do about the actual game itself.
