I don't have the energy to quite squeeze a full essay out of it, but lately i feel increasingly exhausted by the especially reductionist nature of internet culture and how it engages with media.
there's this tendency for works to get boiled down to a single point of failure that gets instantly exaggerated and repeated ad nauseum, regardless of context or content of the actual work, until it simply becomes the collective image of the thing.
For a famous example that'll make a friend happy: the Tidus laugh.
You've surely seen the memes, of which there are endless repetitions, variants, remixes, etc. It has become so emblematic of FFX's allegedly terrible dialogue that it even put me off trying the games for a long time.
I only recently learned the context for that scene, and the part where that laugh is supposed to sound fake. He's being deliberately facetious.
And yeah, the dialogue's a little ropey at times, the direction's very "first-timer", and the PS2 struggles to feed audio fast enough to keep it natural, but I've heard far far worse. But that's nuance, and the Internet has no room for that.
So FFX just becomes Tidus laugh forever in the minds of the public.
And it just seems like this is what criticism is reduced to: every piece of media, good or bad, is reduced to a few of its goofiest moments (when they aren't just ripped out of context or invented whole cloth), that are then just repeated ad nauseum until full thought cancellation is achieved. Movies, games, books, whole fucking creators' bodies of work ...
I'm frankly kinda tired of it.
