I have never before seen Nintendo announcements of reheated leftovers extending their established properties met quite so sourly and bitterly, with sheer venom for a corporation trying to pull a fast one by deviously trying to sell us things they think we'll like to get our money. It might just be the company I keep, but it seems like the zeitgeist nowadays is a pervasive, acute cynical malaise regarding pop culture — overextended exhaustion at the dominance of an endless procession of generic corporate slop, which is widely understood as transparent, listless checkboxing exercises in half-hearted branding where even the enactors seem tired.
This spirit of the times comes essentially pre-defeated. There is no future beyond the horizon, just present conditions replicating endlessly in a downward spiral. There is no widespread idea of an organized alternative culture to garden something you think is more pure and valuable from, and so too no vantage point from which to contemptuously turn your nose up and back on the slop parade. There is no hope of successful opposition to halt or even alter the course of things: we can lash out, but fundamentally the culture industries are unaccountable to you or anyone else with conscience and/or taste. All dissent is mere whining that is crushed beneath the industrial-scale consent-manufacturing apparatus like it's not even underfoot. Maybe this is downstream from mistaking posting for a way of actually effecting change. Or maybe this defeatism is from buying in to hegemonic trumpeting of endless ceaseless victory even when you oppose the victories.
There is a trivially obvious analogy here to USA politics — apologies in advance for the pat, cliche turn of thought here. The Trump administration and the Covid-19 pandemic made it really, really obvious to a lot of people that present arrangements were intolerably terrible. And yet? Despite this loathsome condition and the massive protests? The conditions simply endure year after year after year. The new president's slogan is "nothing will fundamentally change." Seemingly the only policy changes that have occurred in the last 7 years have all been led by reactionaries openly stripping humans of rights and banning books and killing people and not being stopped. We channel our ineffectual rage and despair at reality into the grand "culture war," which is widely intuited to be structurally similar but hopefully more surmountable on the seeming supposition that its unreal play of signs simply matters less than material harm, only to find it mirroring power structures even more closely than we'd like, a place where hopes of positive progress and excising evil are just as dashed.
The dual forces of stagnation and fascism keep winning and winning. And, as was prophesized, we're all sick of winning.