is having nostalgia for all sorts of 80s and 90s games, movies, shows, etc.
and seeing it manifest as brand worship at conventions, online discourse splitting hairs over details of the latest installment of a franchise, fans getting so excited to be drip-fed trivial fanservice with no heart of its own that it succeeds anyway
feeling the dissonance between some of your communities condemning Netflix's vocal pro-transphobia stance and others evidently willing to look past all that to promote their new scrimblo cartoon for them (unpaid)
and looking at how these are all 20+ year old properties
and just saying to yourself "...this should've been ours by now."
and cursing the name of Disney
remembering that the ROM hacking and fangaming communities i grew up in resulted in the first well-designed, almost unanimously well-received Sonic game in ages, and countless other impressive unsanctioned projects
and how Nintendo's approach is to be litigious about things like AM2R, PokéDroid, the vibrant world of Mario World hacks, etc. to try to cover up the evidence that the commons can do a better job than capital can, because that might remind society of the way it was supposed to be all along
people rag on Sonic games for re-doing the green hill zone concept over and over to lean on nostalgia, but at least many of those are variations on the theme — someone needs to tell nintendo that they've made games after 1985. no joke they just use pixel art and music of specifically super mario bros. 1 verbatim all over the place, and it is the most creatively-vacuous thing imaginable
and then there's Kingdom Hearts, or: Flexing How Much Control One Mega-Corporation Has Seized Of Our Culture And Scorched The Commons By Lobbying For Intellectual Property Laws: The Movie: The Game.
so many of these characters should've been public domain by now - a game featuring both Mickey Mouse (1928) and Cloud Strife (1997) wouldn't even be all that unusual today in a world with more-than-reasonable 20-year copyright terms. they've instead been stolen from us, because capitalism.
(Smash Bros. is guilty of this too)
burn mickey-mouse intellectual property law overreach to the ground, and from its ashes reclaim mario, zelda, pokemon, sonic, etc. for the public domain, where they all should've been for years now.
