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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.

I don't have any data for this, but my understanding as a kid in the 1980s was that during the print media age, critics were misaligned with the 18-30 demographic but skewed older. Critics were often dismissive of youth-oriented programming and favored adult-aimed material that many young people considered stiff and dull. I'm not in-tune with gaming journalism, but followed movie criticism closely as a teenager. I was the weird kid who loved both the movies aimed at me but also wanted to see Akira Kurosawa's Ran, because the critics praised it, and watched anything rated 4-stars in the weekly TV section of the newspaper. This meant watching new movies like Ghandi and Out of Africa, and old movies like Ben-Hur, etc. These were "old people" movies. The popular movies might have been skewing younger but the critics were lagging.

With the death of newspapers and rise of digital journalism, I think that critics have either gotten younger or are consciously aiming at that younger readership who look for movie talk on Twitter but never would've read a newspaper had they been the same age in the 1980s.

Maybe this is where you find yourself misaligned: as younger person, you had a taste for the more mature media favored by old critics, and as you've gotten older, the critics have become less mature.

This really rings true to me. I had a broadly similar taste profile as a teen, enjoying weird and esoteric but critically acclaimed stuff regardless of recency (example: I took my ever proper date to watch Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, a 2.5 hour film spoken entirely in Inuktitut, just because I heard it had good reviews from critics. I don't even live in Canada). Similarly with music.