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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):
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.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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