(apologies for the necro, I stumbled upon this thread while lurking and thought i'd give some thoughts since the topic is interesting to me. maybe not the best idea to write this at 12am, but I'm going to try to anyways because I have no time tomorrow.)
Has everybody noticed that zoomers have an unnatural obsessions for the 80s to the 00s? [...] For example, zoomers are trying to revive shit from the past such as Emos, Scenes, Mall-Goths, and Pop-punk. Hell, they are even trying to bring back Myspace under the name of a new website called Friendproject and Spacehey which is funny because zoomers weren't old enough to use Myspace and it was mostly millennials who used it. I don't think Gen Z has an identify of it's own so they take shit from the past because most of them grew in up the social media and smartphone era and those two could be a contributing factor of why subcultures are dead as a whole.
this is extremely true imo
There's talk earlier in the thread of our culture being a bland homogenous mess, and the kids of today being "rootless", and I wholeheartedly agree
All the talk about the supermarket of information as well
Everything these people have known and loved throughout their lives has been almost entirely derivative in some way. Either a reboot of an old franchise, an unpopular entry into an established franchise (the 2000s were a low point for a lot of popular ones still around today so I feel it's a safe generalization), or something "new" with copious amounts of references to other things and no real sincerity to it. It's led to a pervasive victim complex from the enjoyers of this media, taught to them by these cartoons, where they feel the need to constantly hide their interests or their sincere pleasures behind a "cooler" veil, because fairy tales are cliche and plain-evil bad guys are old hat. Overlay that with a constant derision of what these people enjoyed from older fans of that media (ie how much people shat on the SW prequels or how almost every single reboot is typically panned by its original audience, alongside the fans of it), and it leads to
This sardonic online culture of constant irony didn't come from nowhere, and I truly believe the absurdism and smugness of things like 2000s Dreamworks films or cartoons like Adventure Time contributed heavily to its rise. It was media made as parody that eventually grew to be an entirely separate entity, yet continued to treat itself as parody. Shrek was still pulling the "fairy tale but gross and with attitude" shit all the way into 2012, LONG past its original context of mocking the Disney Renaissance, and a lot of the fast-paced humor of early 2010s cartoons can be traced back to the old webcomic style of comedy where someone makes a REALLY obvious video game joke and goes way over the top with it, deriding the thing as "the worst in the world" and "totally nonsensical" for shock value.
It's why there's so much autistic lorefaggotry nowadays, why every little bit of a video game has to look pixel-perfect and everything needs to make 100% sense. Because people grew up on this kind of parody and took it seriously (what else was a kid who'd never been exposed to what was being parodied supposed to do), and demanded insane standards that they just thought were normal from everything in their lives.
It's why there are people who are cancelled over 10 year old tweets. It's why even the most minor slight is perceived as a grave offense that's worth being excommunicated over. The kids of the early internet (without decent parents, which was like 80% of them) were raised to expect absolute perfection, and either deflect when they couldn't live up to that standard or viciously attack whatever fell short of it.
And when you combine this attitude with a neverending flow of information (of variable quality), politics being intertwined in every single facet of day-to-day internet life, and the ever-present irony of internet life, your result is a generation of broken brains without any real basis for what anything should be aside from "unrealistically perfect". People essentially raised as accidental weapons through parody taken out of context, unable to disconnect themselves from that mindset and applying it to everything around them.
It really doesn't help that plenty of millennials egg this behavior on for political gain
and because they're terrible parents who don't understand how brainwashing teenagers is bad for them, because their own political extremism is much easier to justify when they have mobs of mindless children following them just because said millennials have managed to sell this ideology as "the ideal way of the world" or so thoroughly convinced their zoomer followers of how evil the other side is.
Most zoomers, (currently) being teenagers/young-adults, also pay a lot of attention to what's "trending" at the moment. And a LOT of what's trending at the moment is 80s/90s shit, primarily due to the entertainment industry targeting the nostalgia of their mainstream 30-40-year-old customer base for more profit and excuses to be lazy. Nevermind that 80s nostalgia has been beaten to death since the late 2000s; all that matters is 'the now' to these people. (The 2000s are also a part of this 'nostalgia trend', mainly due to being genuinely nostalgic for zoomers instead of them just looking at what's popular.)
Some zoomers also find out about old decades due to looking back at the origins of their favorite franchises, and since a lot of ongoing franchises today originate from the 80s-90s (for example, in terms of cartoons: Transformers, Sailor Moon, Thundercats, MLP) due to being perpetually iterated upon for the sake of continued toy sales, zoomers end up naturally gravitating more towards those decades since they contain some semblance of familiarity to them (as opposed to more "alien" decades like the 50s and 60s, where consumerism was significantly different for the most part and hardly anything outside of superheroes would be recognizable to kids today).
Since these people were raised on parody and long-lasting corporate franchise reboots, all they know how to do is iterate or imitate. Everything they were shown in terms of creative media was in some way mocking or tweaking something old and recognizable, all while doing little original itself (or, if it was original, adopting a sense of humor/storytelling that made sincerity far-fetched), so that's what these people think everything should be. They ape old shit and call it new after giving it a smug smile and a raised eyebrow because that's what they were taught to do. That's the standard that was set for them, that's what they think "new" is.
And it's near-impossible to change that perception considering the internet today (and how much the people I'm talking about are constantly on it), especially after COVID forced most people to basically live on it 24/7, and the flood of information that all contradicts itself.
This lack of base structure, combined with the infinite scope and staggering scale of an internet that can never be definitive and outright demonizes being straightforward about yourself, has led to a generation confused about what is normal and lost in a vague miasma of old and new. A generation without focus or direction, only given purpose as political weaponry for the old guard who have established worldviews and know how to make sense of themselves and the world around them, lost and dumbed-down while desperately trying to cling onto some sort of individual identity as they grow more and more self-aware.
That's not even getting into the absolute fucking dumpster-fire that is the influence of irresponsible parenting combined with high divorce rates, unregulated easy access to depravity as minors through popular shock websites and lack of parental supervision, how American society changed to be significantly more paranoid and hostile to strangers post-9/11, shitstorms like OccupyWallStreet, the Housing crisis, COVID, etc etc etc.
Basically: this generation is fucked, for many many reasons in many many ways. I'm honestly convinced at least a third of it will be dead in a decade or two, and that's assuming that nothing terrible happens along the way to spike that number like a war or some kind of mega-disaster (be it natural or not).
Thank you for coming to my highly autistic TED talk.
