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Part 1: Outsourced intelligence

I’m turning 35 this year, so I’m old enough to remember a time when we all just said things like “butthurt” and the worst someone could do to you was go and bitch about you on some message board floating around out there.

But in the two decades since, people now think they’re smarter than they actually are because now we have YouTube videos for people to watch to tell them everything they want to hear, that feeds into their confirmation bias, about how every little thing that annoys them is ruining society.

It's Fox News but for young people!

But even outside of that, now every drooling farm animal has a whole box of academic sounding terminology to throw at people whenever they’re in a rage.

This is where “The Death of Media Literacy” comes in, which is yet another one of those hysterical moral panics through with entitled brats would find increasing ways overreact to anybody else expressing a contrarian opinion, over something that doesn’t fucking matter.

Hey, did you know we’re all living in a time of unprecedented media illiteracy? All those YouTube content mills told me as such!

Or rather... someone just doesn’t like your favourite show, movie, or video game. Oh no, someone thinks it's... bad!

That last part isn’t anything new. Hardcore fans of absolutely everything have always been shouting down opinions they don't like with variations of “You just don’t get it!” or “You need to spend at least 100 hours!”.

However, in the years since, it’s clear that there’s been an effort from the toughest gorillas in captivity to re-brand themselves as intellectuals, so now in the place of flame wars, it’s all just a bunch of hysterical moaning about how everyone else but them just doesn’t understand diverse forms of art.

Part 2: Star Trek

Superman and Star Trek seem to be the most common examples of “the death of media literacy”, and if you don’t think about it for too long, the conservative Star Trek fan is an obvious case of such a thing.

Star Trek is one of the most unapologetically leftist shows ever made, right? It’s a show about things like racial diversity and fully automated communism in space!

But... it’s also a show about how a strictly American-coded organization is the benevolent peacekeeper of the world, single-handedly holding up galactic stability, surrounded on all sides by depictions of...

Jewish people.

African people.

And Chinese people.

Gene Roddenberry was a very progressive man! He often dreamed of a brighter future where humanity had grown up, and often believed humanity couldn’t get to space before it grew up.

But... he was also painfully American, born in the early 1920s, creating a television show in the mid 1960s, so all of Star Trek’s political messaging is still glazed in this weird American exceptionalism.

If you watch Star Trek where it first began, you’ll often find way more of the Federation bringing civilization and enlightenment to other people, than you will see them dealing with an internal problem.

When it does, those problems are the result of bad apples, individual people going bad, but not the system itself enabling them and encouraging them.

What is a Conservative? We’ll say for the sake of argument that it’s defined by the belief that the system we live in is fine and it doesn’t need changing. And we can extend that to we, ourselves, are fine and doesn't need changing.

There’s an episode that deals with a very obvious parallel to racism with aliens who are black on one side and white on the other, and discriminate based on which side is which.

But... that episode is still fundamentally about America, I mean, the Federation, educating a decidedly “less modern” people. And conservatives, and arguably people in general, they love anti-racism when it’s them who gets to educate and/or feel superior to others!

I would say it’s that “other people’s problem” mentality is the core bedrock of conservatism, and it’s a bedrock Star Trek generally doesn’t actively try to fight.

It wouldn’t be until... Voyager, where it’s the first time America, I mean, the Federation, really has to learn from other people.

That whole "bastion of morality" thing really falls apart in Voyager, thus cracking the mythology that allows conservative ideology to flourish.

The thing is, when you take the time to actually sit down to take a look at it, the idea of a conservative Star Trek fan, at least early on, is actually pretty easy to understand, and it's not the searing contradiction the internet likes to make it out to be.

It’s all just a matter of perspective. And honestly, it’s probably lazy to avoid making your own analysis and ask the writer to tell you the correct answer.

Part 3: You all ruined the fun of analysis

Did you survive all that? I'm on my third hour of writing this!

Anyways, when it comes to things like subtext, metaphor, and symbolism, you can say what you will about Kunihiko Ikuhara, but Revolutionary Girl Utena was clearly made with the intent that it be critiqued and analyzed. It’s why he’s so consistently unhelpful in that regard.

But on the other end of the spectrum, I’m not really a big fan of this. When you fill your story with all this symbolism, you can’t really complain when people come up with the complete opposite of your specific intent.

You know why? Because it's fun. It's fucking fun.

You don't fill your story with symbolism, and then get mad when other people come up with their own answers. Isn't that the whole fucking point? It's what makes symbolism a valid narrative tool.

How about this? Miyazaki and Takahata were both aggressive about their artistic messages. It speaks to someone who's confident in their own creative identity. If one of their films has a message, it'll just be about what it's about, and this is true of all of their most mature films especially.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind gets to the root of why environmentalism is so important. Grave of the Fireflies is an oppressively dark parable about how pride can be deadly. The Tale of Princess Kaguya truly understands why someone would commit suicide, a life devoid of joy.

Or hell, what about Toby Fox? The more confident you are in conveying your ideas and messages, as it is, the less lame it becomes. It actually becomes lamer the more you coat it, be that in irony, self-deprecation, or what-have-you.

You see, getting back on track, there’s this World of Warcraft YouTuber who does this thing every once in a while where he makes a video taking a position most of it’s player-base would ether completely disagree with or find contentious. Typically "the villain did nothing wrong".

A big reason why they’re all so well done is because none of the things he cites or says is “technically” incorrect. It’s just a contrary read of the information, and is so obviously against the intent of the writers.

But here’s the thing... that’s just how having a critical perspective works. It’s all a matter of perspective. You can go into a story with just about any particular lens and read it that way.

This is what a lot of people find the most fun about discourse and critical analysis, by the way, and is why all these dumb-fucks who won’t stop shrieking about “media literacy” need to fall off a goddamned ledge.

Part 4: The thing about Moral Panics

When it comes to moral panics, one of the first examples I can remember was the over-medication of society. Back in the 2000s, you couldn’t blink without some asshole bitching about how everybody has ADHD now. Oh no, now every child is on drugs!

But... in reality, the ability to adequately identify and treat ADHD simply meant that more people were getting diagnosed who would’ve previously been left to struggle or take up smoking.

And that's it. It really is that simple.

But that doesn’t matter because a bunch of old fucks got cranky that the world was changing, and those other people who had been previously left to just suffer on their own, weren’t acceptable to abuse and make fun of anymore.

Gee, I sure am glad I have to put up with shit like this every 3-5 years or so!

Over the years, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that people will take their personal grievances, be that annoying kids, disabled people, gay people, black people, computer nerds, reality TV, brand logos, and anyone on the internet who has the audacity to criticize, disagree with, or tells them what to do, and tries to spin that into a culture that’s degenerating society.

No, what’s the real problem? What is it? You mean you have to see their takes on your feed? Oh, poor baby! Grow up. Their opinions don’t matter. This sort of thing only really starts becoming a problem if other people’s personal and subjective takes really bothers you so much in the first place.

You're just being hysterical.

You are fucking insane. There’s always going to be people who don’t like the things you like, and no amount of being a bitchy, overstimulated drama queen is gonna change that. You'll just have to get over it.