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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18817 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):

the most reactionary movie I've ever seen and the future zoomer world order is bright and wonderful. I would have called it "The humiliation of the coward Jack Black and the end of irony"

... [A]fter this introduction, when [Jack Black] sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.

The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.

The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”, but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction

... On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie. The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch. Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense. When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve.

... The story ultimately never portrays “the minecraft world” as a good place, but a place of indulgence, of Id expression and satisfaction... [Steve] is a gooner. And the film itself utterly rejects him: there is no ambiguity here, the minecraft world is bad, and the real world is what matters. “being creative” in minecraft is shallow and hollow, and is a bad outlet for your talents.

The hypersaturated world of hyperreality, of the media-mediated reality that was forced on the zoomers, as their parents plopped a phone or ipad on them as children, is a shallow and hollow mimicry of the real world, and exposing children to “minecraft” at age 9 is not going to make them more “creative”, it is just going to make them into autistic gooners. It is not really a minecraft movie. It is a movie about the zoomer life experience, and a genuine and open confrontation with prior generations. The minecraft branding is arbitrary. The emotional core of the movie, and there truly is a genuine human emotional core, is a genuine inter-generational dialogue.

And I say, the reason the zoomers like it, is not some ironic doubly irony joke where they pretend to like a bad movie - that is just what it looks like to millenials, because “that’s what millennials do”. The reason they like it is because they resonate with a story about being raped by a magical portal that sends you to a fake world you have to escape from. And that is extremely genuine and real, and the movie totally succeeds in expressing something, that possibly haven’t been captured in art before, with the novelty of our technological-historical situation.

I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.

But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.

... showing over and over again that Jack Black, as a stand in for gen X nihilism and millennial irony, is totally oblivious, that he doesn’t “get it”, that he is a clown who is not in on the joke... It’s funny, engaging, and genuine. And Jack Black is not in on the joke. That’s what makes it work and that’s the point, and as the credits rolled in the theater, two zoomers who were leaving turned around and waved and smiled and yelled something to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, and I think that’s beautiful.

Thoughts? Is he way off base here?

I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.

You're skipping a generation there. While a lot of current addictive internet creations are millennial, the earliest examples are Gen X. Google, Youtube, and Myspace/Friendster were all Gen X. Ditto some of the early hyper-addictive video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and of course the smart phones themselves.

I saw the characters less as any kind of generational warfare commentary and more as archetypes of the people who tend to play Minecraft. You have:

-(Steve) People who see Minecraft less as a game, and more as an open-ended artistic outlet. The types you see in the YouTube compilations of complicated sculptures, nifty machines and giant architectural projects.

-(Garret) Serious “hardcore” gamers who play Minecraft in addition to hundreds of other games.

-(Dawn) Normie casuals who mostly enjoy Minecraft for the cute aesthetics

-(Henry and Natalie) Children, and people who recently played Minecraft as children and are now entering young adulthood.

About ten years ago, a new form of cultural criticism emerged on places as diverse as 4Chan’s /tv/, Twitter and Slate Star Codex’s Culture War Roundup thread.

The general message was always the same. An ostensibly mainstream or even outwardly progressive Hollywood movie was secretly Based™️, sometimes supposedly intentionally on the part of a secretly redpilled director or writer, mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.

I’ve written comments like this, I’ve enjoyed comments like this. But you can’t be too serious about them, and in fact you could write a similar narrative about almost any movie or TV show you can think of.

Shoutouts to Kontextmaschine's Reactionary Readings of Beloved 80's Movies.

Isn't it just a reversing of the "When you think about it, LoTR has a powerful queer subtext" style of thing?

No, because that kind of critic actually believes that Tolkien truly on purpose wrote a secret gay romance that he had to conceal because of the sensibilities of the age. Most of these takes don’t actually believe that a bunch of Hollywood progressive writers covertly stuffed dissident right themes into a kids movie, it’s just a funny creative writing exercise.

I don't think that's what people who make that argument believe - Tolkien's convictions are too transparent and visible for that. I think it's more Death-of-the-Author, that regardless of what Tolkien personally believed, the text can (and implicitly should) be 'queered'.

I've encountered this method in, for instance, academic biblical criticism, where the exegete says quite openly that what they are doing is 'breaking open' or 'queering' the text to find a meaning that was certainly not intended by the human author, but is powerful and liberatory in its own way, and so on.

No, because that kind of critic actually believes that Tolkien truly on purpose wrote a secret gay romance that he had to conceal because of the sensibilities of the age.

I don't think this is true. Some people occasionally believe that, but left-wing media criticism really likes Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author (albeit a really simplified version thereof). "Queering a text" is usually thought of as a deliberate creative exercise, akin to fanfiction. Certainly there's hardly anyone who thinks Kirk/Spock was intentional, but they find it no less delightful to watch TOS with shipping goggles on.

How much of it is just that people want to unabashedly discuss and analyze mainstream/progressive works?

To be fair, ignoring what the author thought they were saying, and overanalyzing what actually ended up on the page or screen is a big part of any kind of literary or film criticism.

I agree, but the popularity and particularly rote nature of this specific category of criticism is a feature of the post-2014 internet.

Makes sense because traditional film criticism got unreadable right around that time. It was either marvel-fried brain « things asplode good ! » or rigid DEI point-counting  in the style of christian film criticism for children : swearing -1 point, ignoring parents’ advice -2 points, etc.

mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.

I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?

I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.

I think Harry Potter is an interesting example of the author not understanding her own text.

Or, well, it's an extraordinarily interesting text because of how widely and inconsistently it has been interpreted.

Structurally, as it were, the bones of Harry Potter are conservative or Tory. This is probably inherited a lot from the boarding school novel that it imitates, but it can't all be accounted for that way. Regardless of the origin, Potter is a series about legitimate institutional authority, tradition, family, and virtue. The demagogic populist Voldemort and the inept bureaucracy of the Ministry must both fold before these things. Harry is exuberant to the point of disobedience sometimes, but that is the necessary energy of a young man who is being trained into a stalwart defender of the moral order. Note the exaltation of marriage and family as well - Harry's significance comes from his parents, while Voldemort is from an orphanage after being abandoned by his mother.

J. K. Rowling, however, is a liberal feminist and a Labour woman, and when asked she interprets her own work along other lines - tolerance, feminism, anti-racism, a plea for equality, and so on. There are elements of the text you can read like this (anti-muggle-blood prejudice is certainly mocked), but on the whole this has never come off as terribly convincing. Hermione's experiments with civil rights activism, for instance, are generally played for laughs, and no character really takes a serious interest in large-scale change.

Finally there's the progressive fan read of it. Though the books are arguably pretty conservative, like Kirk/Spock, Harry Potter slash was massively influential and I don't think you can write a history of fandom in the 20th century while omitting it. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Hogwarts as something like a giant closet, and eventually the whole Resistance-coded reading of Potter that we've all seen widely mocked. Despite my tone here, I don't actually want to treat this reading with contempt. What a book becomes 'in the wild' can vary considerably from what the text actually says on the surface, and from what the author thinks it's about, and the huge explosion of creativity and fan interest in this version of Potter suggests that, however unintentional, there have been resonances here.

(I theorise that it's to do with the academic setting - the classic boarding school novel is set in a world where secondary and higher education are genuinely Tory, but the world of the 21st century, especially in America, is one where higher education has become a progressive bastion, so now the idea of the authority of the school and the values it seeks to impart to those in its care reads as progressive.)

I suspect Rowling is simply completely unaware of the real-world implications of Defense against Dark Arts, and would instinctively shy away from recognizing the analogy. A more charitable view would be that she recognizes it but thinks that the world of wizarding is a throwback to earlier times when such things were necessary, and in our civilized world we have government to do our defense for us -- that sort of thing is not uncommon among American gun control supporters. It clashes with the idea that the magical ministries are pretty obviously satirizing the real ones, but whatever. There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.

It's also an instance of a more general problem of fiction aimed at minors; you typically have to make people of similar age the major players in the book, and to do so you have to give them far more responsibility than they have in the real world. Or maybe the problem is not actually with the fiction.

I feel like the whole thing wasn't ever designed to be rigorous in the first place. The way magic works is inconsistent, consistently whimsy, and conveniently suited to whatever the plot is at the moment. I want to double-underscore whimsy here (the chocolate frog cards? ever-flavor beans? constant alliterations? freaking owls?) and point out it's really more whimsy for its own sake, rather than making a broader point (like magical realist novels do). Rather than world-building taking place from the start, offering hints as to future books, aspects of the world are constantly tacked-on in precisely the book they become relevant. Major events are plainly ret-conned as the series progresses. There is never a satisfying explanation for why the magical world actually manages to stay hidden nor how Muggle tech never gets used at all - except for, like, trains. I also feel like HP was ahead of the curve of the "modern" YA novel - later entries would be much more explicit in their attempts to place teenagers front and center in the plot.

So yeah, the point of the novels is to be whimsy, and explore a Chosen One narrative in a school setting. That's it. Everything else is bolted on and accessory.

The simple, textual answer is just that DoDA in general only worked against bad guys. Expecto Patronus only kills Dementors, just like holy water only kills vampires. Indeed, when Potter et al are in duels, they largely rely on a disarming spell, not the death or pain spells. (The limited dueling repertoire is definitely a weakness of Rowling's action scenes.)

DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse. And of course they DID learn the unforgivable curses; Harry tries to use two of them. There's Stupefy (stun), Petrificus Totalus (body bind), Sectumsempra (cut), Bombarda (explosion), Confringo (blasting), Incendio (fire), Levicorpus (hang someone in the air by his feet; strangely specific but probably quite useful for interrogation). Lots of good stuff that works on everyone.

DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse.

This is even made explicit in the books themselves at one point: Harry defends his use of Expelliarmus in a broom chase by pointing out that Stunning them will make them fall from their brooms and kill them just as well.

"Harry, the time for Disarming is past! These people are trying to capture and kill you! At least Stun if you aren’t prepared to kill!"

"We were hundreds of feet up! Stan’s not himself, and if I Stunned him and he’d fallen, he’d have died the same as if I’d used Avada Kedavra!"

It has to be noted that unlike defending yourself with a gun, a wand is a lot more optionally lethal. The stunning curse that Harry habitually uses and teaches his classmates in Order of the Phoenix is probably less dangerous than a taser.

The caveat is that all those spells are only reliable against an enemy who can't use shielding charms. Avada Kedavra is the only spell advertised as something that can't be blocked.

The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.

The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.

They DO, though. Well, "Mad-Eye" does, but he is the DaDA teacher at the time.

Right, but it’s noted that those lessons are basically illegal and permitted only on Dumbledore’s say-so. They’re also noted to be pretty unethical and leave Neville and Harry semi-traumatised. They don’t teach any of those curses either, just how to resist them. And finally of course they’re an initial hint that Mad-Eye is a Death Eater, although they can’t be that out of character for the original.

Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.

Forgive the geekiness, but Sectumsempra is very pointedly a bit of obscure dark magic that a teenager had no business learning - the whole deal is that he finds it in what later turns out to be Snape's old diary, and uses it on Malfoy without knowing what it'll do. It wasn't something he was taught in defense class.

Yeah, both Sectumsempra and Levicorpus were Snape's. He wrote them as a teenager, IIRC, being a dark genius himself. Still, even if you don't count those, there's plenty of DoDA spells that work just fine on good guys.

Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.

The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.

I suspect Rowling is simply completely unaware of the real-world implications of Defense against Dark Arts, and would instinctively shy away from recognizing the analogy.

I think half the fun of these "misreadings" of the text is that it forces us to acknowledge the complexities of reality: even in a constructed magical world, "but what if I need to use (near) lethal force to defend myself?" is in fact a question that doesn't have a trivial answer. Well, some partisans on both sides would have you think it has two different ones, but I'll accept some level of nuance.

There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.

Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.

She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")

There is an interesting moment in HP 7 where they are preparing to smuggle Harry and the Dursleys to safety. Vernon Dursley asks why he has to trust his family’s safety to randos and suggests talking to the Ministry of Magic.

“Harry laughed; he could not stop himself. It was so typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the Establishment, even in this world that he despised and distrusted.”

Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?

But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.

I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.

know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years

I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.

in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.

To steelman as much as I can, yes to the first point (defending one’s own life and limb) but not the second.

DADA was never portrayed as being about defending against the government; it was always about fighting off malicious magical creatures (earlier books) or dark magic performed by evil witches and wizards (later books). That the Ministry of Magic was at first subverted by a recalcitrant Fudge who wanted to cover up Voldemort’s return, and then co-opted by Voldemort himself, was never mentioned as a reason for studying DADA.

Does it matter?

In practice the unsubverted government saw competent wizards (reacting to a real threat) as a threat to it. Its response was to select the longhouse manifest, Umbridge, to totally remove all practical knowledge in favor of book learning and indoctrination in schools.

The subverted government was obviously even worse. Most wizards are incompetent at defense magic, and as a result seem powerless once Voldemort starts imposing his will. The well-meaning apparatchiks like Umbridge reveal themselves to be tyrants just waiting for an excuse.

In practice the message ends up being that you can't trust the government (not even to protect itself) and so must defend yourself. That's basically the RW American take and the Ministry of Magic is arguably more arbitrary and illiberal than the US state.

I think what @2rafa is getting at is that certain writers are "covertly based" i.e. they have edgy political opinions which they are consciously choosing to hide, and smuggling them into their works under cover of darkness.

I think what you're getting at is certain writers being "unconsciously based" i.e. they sincerely do not hold any edgy political opinions, but if you follow the implications of their writing to its logical conclusion you end up in a surprisingly edgy place, which the writer did not consciously intend.

I think the likelihood that JK Rowling believes (whether consciously or unconsciously) that real-life teenagers should be armed with deadly weapons is somewhere around nil, even if that's an entirely valid reading of the Harry Potter books.

2rafa did mention the unconsciously based in passing, I was just pointing out that I don't think it's an exercise in mental masturbation to analyse it but rather a window into an internal conflict in the author. I wouldn't be so quick in saying that JK Rowling doesn't believe unconsciously that real teenagers should be armed. She probably will never admit it. But I think her bedrock beliefs would lead her to that position, because when she tried to write a story in coherent universe she built herself it naturally led her there. She will only persist in claiming the opposite because the anti-gun/gun control was strongly imprinted onto her by the society she grew up in.

She probably will never admit it.

Given to the extent to which she's made herself persona non grata among the woke set by her refusal to budge or play along on the trans issue (the hot-button political issue of the day, especially in the UK; there are essentially no British equivalents to American 2A diehards insisting on the right to bear arms), I put a lot more stock in Rowling's willingness to speak her mind, even if doing so would make her unpopular. I mean, we're talking about a woman who went from being the most successful and beloved children's writer of her generation, to having her fans turn on her, dox her, send her death and rape threats by the thousands, compose creepy fanfiction about her violent death - all because of her obstinate refusal to mouth woke platitudes she didn't personally endorse.

when she tried to write a story in coherent universe

I don't think Harry Potter is a coherent universe, and I don't think she ever intended it to be. Whatever pretense of internal consistency was abandoned as soon as she introduced time travel, then promptly forgot about it.

Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.

I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

I'd say that a clear supermajority of the Finnish people hold this belief, at least - with the caveat that the definition would have the armed people being the Finnish nation as represented by the conscription-based Finnish Armed Forces and the bad guys and their oppressive government being Russia and Putin.

No, these are not the same and in context are close to opposites. Trusting the Finnish Armed Forces would be like trusting the Ministry of Magic.

I think this is a case where there is a lot of mutual incomprehension between Americans and Europeans due to different historical mythologies reflecting different histories.

In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution*, liberty is secured by the ability of the nation-in-arms to check the power of the armed forces of the democratic state. In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the French Revolution, liberty is secured by the fact that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state**. Finland (alongside Switzerland) is one of the few European countries where that is still a realistic statement of how the armed forces work. Contra Nybbler downthread, if you accept that worldview then the Finnish government didn't corruptly turn on its own people in order to appease the Soviets - the Finnish government and people surrendered to the Soviets after losing the Continuation War.

* The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop on what we (wrongly) saw as the least important front of a three-continent mostly-naval war against France. This isn't quite true, but it is a lot closer to the truth than "Colonial militias were able to take down the British Empire by virtue of local knowledge and superior woodcraft."

** It wasn't

I know it's not the same thing, I was just playing around with the literal meaning of the words.

It has always struck me that the American belief that the most likely chance to have to face down an oppressive government from the inside is a belief enabled by the fact of belonging to the most powerful country in the world without any conceivable external enemy that could defeat it in warfare; in a small nation with a powerful authoritarian neighbor, the threat matrix and the perceived ways to combat that threat are obviously different.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...

We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Also, the same weapons and the same spirit that effectively precludes totalitarian domination also precludes domination by foreigners. Or in the vernacular, "welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker."

Quote attribution, please

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As Abraham Lincoln once said:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

The American belief goes back to the Revolutionary period, long before the US was the most powerful country in the world.

The Finnish Armed Forces and the state they are embedded in, of course, cannot be trusted. They'd be happy to appease their big Eastern neighbor by oppressing their own people rather than fighting; they did it before, after all.

I know, I'm mostly expanding on the aspect 2rafa mentioned with:

mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.

Which is likely the case with JK Rowling. I just think it's a very worthwhile aspect to analyze in media, and likely the result of an author not examining their own beliefs honestly, and not just an empty thought experiment. Not every children's book ends up making an accidental case for teens carrying guns to school.

I liked the one about how the Angry Birds movie was secretly a metaphor for stopping Syrian refugees from arriving into Western countries.

Thoughts? Is he way off base here?

I have no idea, but this unroll is the only thing I've seen that has made me want to watch the Minecraft movie. My Zoomer students all seem to have enjoyed it, though the only explanation they could give was "I just thought it was a good movie, actually, and that kind of surprised me."

For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, with nerdy overtones. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close, yet so far.

I've never played Minecraft, is this more of a late-millennial thing? (I was born in 1984.)

I'm a little older than you. I discovered Minecraft during it's Alpha from reddit, and binged hard along with my at the time girlfriend. We got seriously lost in Minecraft, and just ordered takeout for a week while we indulged our mutual addiction to exploration and crafting. I lost interest at some point after biomes came out I think? That's all so long ago, sometimes I watch videos about Minecraft and outside of the blocky world, I don't recognize anything that is happening anymore.

I first played it in late 2009 when it was still super primitive, even before alpha, and I was basically instantly blown away by it even in its simplest form. I’m an elder millennial and I was in my 20s at the time, having just started my career.

I might have legitimately been one of the first 100,000 people to play Minecraft in the world.

It’s incredibly funny when I tell kids this, they look at me like I’m a wizened old sorcerer when I spin tales of the old country. My own kids aren’t old enough to understand but where I tell a kid who’s 9-12 about old Minecraft it blows their little minds.

If you want a crazy blast down memory lane, there is still the original forum post up (albeit with some broken image links, but not all) when Notch posted one of the very earliest versions, and it's still hilarious to me how instantly people got addicted, started building castles with moats, pixel art, and suggested multiplayer and survival modes. You can page through some of the 90+ pages of responses, it's nuts to see how instant the positive response was.

I started playing when it was in alpha, survival was still a "new" thing, and the "demo" was a web-browser playable limited-size world with the basic blocks and water flooding instantly to the water level, without a save feature. I was entranced even with that basic setup.

A little hidden gem in that forum thread is the mention of spelunky;

While not as famous as Minecraft, I think it was actually more influential on the history of gaming writ large.

I also played the original freeware version of it and was blown away by it, it came out only a bit before early Minecraft. It totally blew me away and was also an early trendsetter for procedural generation, and basically spawned an entire genre of games and various subgenres.

Legitimately one of the greatest games ever made.

But in retrospect

You know, this got me thinking about how long the tails of games are now. Like, I adored my father, and when I started playing Nintendo games, he would show off how good he was as Donkey Kong, which was apparently his goto arcade game once upon a time. Blew me away that he could "beat" it on the Nintendo, which if memory serves, and it may not, was completing all 4 screens at least once? I donno. But I had little incentive to play Donkey Kong myself, nor was I amazed at his Donkey Kong "lore", I was just impressed my dad could play an old game, but I preferred the newer ones like Super Mario Brothers 3.

Compared with the 15(?) year legacy of Minecraft, yeah, kids are still going fucknuts over the same game it's feasible that their parents went fucknuts over a decade prior. There are titles so evergreen, they've become a multi-generational institution not unlike reading the same books to your kid that were read to you. The only thing slowing it down is parents' awareness of the dangers of screen time for young children.

Yeah, that era changed gaming in a big way. Modding, free content updates, games so dominant in their space that multiplayer was permanent, all happened in just a few short years. League came out in 2009, Minecraft in 2010, Skyrim in 2011. Okay, fine, CS is older, and so is WoW, but both of those released paid expansions or new games periodically, so they don't quite fit the same. But the iPhone came out in 2007, so right in that same period when smartphones hit critical mass was when the first microtransaction-based games came out. FarmVille in 2009, Clash of Clans in 2012, Candy Crush Saga in 2012. So that 2009-2012ish period had an unusually massive impact.

Minecraft alpha first got mainstream attention in September 2010, so it'd more of a formative teenager experience for people born in the mid-to-late 1990s at earliest. There's older folk who got into it early, myself included, but in your age it'd be either competing with late college or early career stuff. And there's been regular resurgences -- 2013-2016 with real mainstreaming of both modded and multiplayer streamers for example -- so it's not really a single generational thing.

Yes, I was not much older than a child when Minecraft burst onto the scene, and despite that, it still was astonishing to me when Minecraft started to be treated as “kids stuff.” When I got into it it had an all-ages appeal and the YouTube Minecraft community was full of adults who played it because they enjoyed it, not because they wanted ad dollars from companies wanting to advertise to children. I remember when the focal point of Minecraft content switched from normal gaming YouTubers to people like StampyLongHead, who always came across to me as kinda creepy in his obvious attempt to appeal directly to children over the internet.

Real OPs remember when paulsoaresjr tutorials were the premier way to learn about Minecraft. Even realer OP’s remember X’s adventures in Minecraft.

Ah, well yes I'd say so, so that's a good point. Anyone college age or younger when it started getting big 2010-2011, so I'll admit that only captures... maybe half? Dunno if it really "counts" the older half Millennial parents playing it with their kids. I'll admit I'm '93, on the tail end, so that might skew my perspective slightly. Considering also the male-coded aspect, maybe it's only about a quarter of Millennials? Still, curious if any broader theme resonates, or if the whole thing is making a mountain out of a molehill.

i've never understood the appeal of Minecraft, hopefully someone explains.

  • Vanilla survival. You're placed into a random location, under serious and often annoying constraints, such that Things Will Suck if you don't change them. That's not just the normal combat-progression stuff, although the difference between stone tools and enchanted diamond ones are pretty vast too. Traveling too far taking too long? Build a highway through hell or tame a horse or breed a mule, or get a hangglider ('elytra') and be able to cover in seconds what could previously take ten minutes. Creepers blow up your front door (again)? Build a guard post, or tame an ocelot to scare them off. Sick of running out of food? Build a scenic farm and start raising animals.

  • Creatives. Yes, the graphics are dated and it's nothing like equivalent to a true modeling software, but you can build a lot with it. More importantly, if you're struggling to make something in Creative Mode, it's not likely to be because the controls are fighting you, unlike something like Blender.

  • Completionism. Collect some amount of every block, get to every dimension and beat the Ender Dragon, have a fully functional (and safe) village, get all the achievements, yada yada.

  • 'Technical' minecraft play. You know those stories where someone get sucked into a world with bizarre rules and has to find ways to exploit them? Minecraft is one of those things, and even in the modern day a lot of it's still something to be discovered or shared for most kids, rather than Just Look At GameFAQs. In vanilla, this can range from iron or cactus farming to breaking bedrock to RS-latchs and sorting systems to self-driving mining machines. (I haven't seen the movie, but this is one of the reasons I don't think the thread-writer is really engaged with the game: the bucket nun-chunks thing from the trailers is absolutely the sort of things that minecraft players mentor each other with.)

  • In modded minecraft, the above, but more so. Mods like Create or Botania have dozens of major puzzles built into their basic play, and hundreds or thousands if you're trying to go after specific uses. Or you can go the full GregTech-focused modpack if you want. Some of these might have only a few hundred active players, or you can make challenges that literally no one has ever tried. (HexCasting with dolphin memory? Using Spectrum and NeepMeat as your sole item transportation mods in a factory-focused pack like MI:Foundation? GFL.)

  • Survival multiplayer, aka social play. These tend to be some of the most popular and funniest to watch, but a lot of people just enjoy goofing off (or dying horribly) with friends. HyPixel is the degenerate (ie, gotcha game) case, but the ideal case has a variety of people finding different things that they enjoy doing, and then having them work with each other on that.

  • Guided challenges. Popularized by JadedCats Agrarian Skies in the 1.6 era, modded games can include questbooks or other breadcrumbs with specific challenges to complete, usually starting with basic survival and going onto things like automating production of million meals or building a single piece of the forbidden clay. Blightfall is probably the most whole-heartedly designed approach down to a fully customized world, but Create: Above and Beyond, the Material Energy series, SevTech, Manufactio, Crash Landing, and Cottage Witch are all great options for different types of play. (GregTech:NewHorizons is the magnum opus in a... different sense.)

There is a world beyond these shores, a new world ready for you to shape, full of ancient wonders, fantastical creatures, mighty foes and riches beyond imagination.

Embark on this journey with nothing but your wits and your friends, and make your mark. You will tame these new shores and uncover the secrets of its ancient inhabitants as you make yourself the rightful shepherd of these lands and beyond.

Or, forego all danger and give yourself the power of a God, and draw from your imagination to shape a whole world into the cathedrals of your mind.

Or, bring yourself into a truly anarchic free for all competition for domination and survival. Many legendary figures have lived here before you and the world bears the marks of their wars. Ancient forteresses blown up, empires defiled, and yet so much that still remains hidden, forgotten and lost. Find help in your fellow man, but remember that alliances are fleeting, and that people can find your exact location through the patterns of the stone in a picture.

To add to the other comments. It also has a lot of mods. Some that focus on action and adventure, others that focus more on the pure creation lego aspect, and then you also have automation mods. Like Factorio was inspired by a Minecraft mod originally. So an entire genre came out of it.

The lego aspect of it really appealed to me as a kid, but I still love the automation mods. Especially when your base is functional and looks good.

For my generation, a few aspects, but to me the core appeal was the sort of human (male) survival-adjacent aspect. You are in a world alone, you survive, beat down the wildlife, bend it to your will, build things that leave a permanent mark on the world, etc. Scratches a bit of the human itch that way. There was also originally a bit of the self-taught pride, because you had to go to the wiki to figure out how to actually make stuff (the game literally had no tutorial for over 6 years!) or consult YouTube to set up some limited automation via some jank unintentional mechanics (for example, to originally boost a minecart to crazy speeds, you had to have little smaller minecarts spinning in tiny circle tracks tangential to your main track) so if you did something notable (or creative/effortful, especially in a server with friends), it was impressive! And also, for those of us in school or college, it was a nice side outlet that felt a little more wholesome than the games like counterstrike, Dota2, League, etc. that were just getting going at the time. Plus, updates were frequent, so you could re-discover and build on your knowledge (for free) a few months or years after last playing, or maybe a friend would start up a server, so you'd potentially go in cycles of binging.

How about the appeal of legos? But there's also a mode where instead of just having all the legos you want, you have to hunt for/create them, following a gameplay loop, with just enough adversarial events (monsters) to keep you from getting complacent too easily.

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