Gretchen
The PlayStation Experiment | Game Mag Print Ads | Rando Chrontendo
software engineer @ Internet Archive
anarcho-left
trans lesbian 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
The misuse of "lost media" as a term seems to be largely driven by how Zoomers and teens love community-driven lore like The Backrooms and FNAF offshoots mixed with the appeal of lore-ifying a lot of mysterious "weird" media from the 80s and 90s, but it's really fucking up actual media history work.
Might try to actually organize my thoughts on this at some point, but they're... complicated.
Personally I'd push back on pinning this mainly on Gen Z. Remember creepypastas like Ben Drowned and Pokémon Black?
I don't remember either of those things, but I'm talking specifically about real media that is from before Gen Z's time that they find novel due to its obscurity/weirdness and build a lot of conflated history around, not creepypasta urban legends that are easily verifiable as fake.
I was reading that as The Backrooms and Five Nights at Freddy's in some way causing the lore-ification of weird media from before zoomers' time, although even if that's not case the creepypastas still suggest that impulse to lore-ify old media stretches back before zoomers entered the picture.
Sure. If I make an actual essay out of this idea at some point, I would trace the impulse back way further than creepypastas.
I feel this. I started watching a video about various lost media found so far in 2023 because I like to hear about people finding old game prototypes, film reels sitting in someone's attic for decades with missing Doctor Who episodes, that sort of thing...
but instead got "I ripped this obscure 80s kids show from an even more obscure streaming service".
Yeah, and then someone else takes the inaccurate information in that video and updates their Wikia and then that Wikia shoots to the top of search results over the actually correct sources, making finding accurate info that much harder.
