it's taken a while, but we've slowly gotten back to where gaming was in fuckin 2005. the difference is that it's come on the backs of indie and AA devs who are actually passionate about the shit they make
this heavily depends on your tolerance for AIDS and retardation, and I'd honestly disagree very strongly just due to the fact that I'm talking about the mainstream and not the indie scene (because, depending on your tastes, that has
always been good but never been very easily accessible, and imo the good indie shit nowadays is
definitely not easily accessible), but otherwise I guess that's fair enough
except "better times" almost universally means "the happiness of childhood".
zoomers are starting to recycle cursed post-9/11 shit (like Frutiger Aero lmao) just like millennials recycled disco and hair metal.
Hence why people are clinging onto the only happiness in childhood most of these kids had. There was
literally nothing better for them in almost every single fucking part of their lives. Not in media, not in real life, not even in the most basic human activities like hobbies or social interaction.
Not even including divorce rates, seriously, how many zoomer kids would you say have had a pretty good childhood? A decent one, even? Something tolerable? Compared to the standards of the three generations before them, zoomers have had it fucking
rough. I don't think there's a single decade in their entire lives one would consider "good" compared to anything that came before. Just going off of someone born in, let's say, 2005:
- born right before a financial crisis that lasted throughout his entire early childhood, likely either tore apart their family or otherwise affected it very badly and most certainly ruined their finances for years to come,
- started attending public school during the Common Core and "healthy lunches" era, where he got called racist for calling out the disruptive niglet making learning his infuriating whole-word English learning even harder,
- throughout this elementary education he heard nonstop talk about corrupt bankers running everything and Wall Street being evil, the world being a huge racist hellhole and giant riots taking place because one of the aforementioned disruptive niglets was killed for being a disruptive niglet.
- started middle school just as gay marriage got legalized and "literally Hitler" rose to power, heard nothing save for how his country was being run into the ground and everyone was going to die because the gays couldn't make some dude bake them a cake,
- taught all throughout this that he's evil just for being born a certain way, and that the creepy men in makeup visiting his school to read to the kindergarteners are better than him because they fuck monkeys and other men instead of women,
- grew up just as the Internet made sure he never went without hearing any of this, even during his time off, and most attempts at social interaction either relied on him constantly being exposed to this endless, vitriolic, radioactively-toxic pessimism or ended up going bust because of it,
- throughout all of this, all he's heard about the entertainment or literature or culture he's been able to indulge in is how bad he should feel for consuming it because "it's so much worse than the originals," "it's so sexist," various other reasons that x thing he likes is bad to the point where more than half of his generation's TV equivalent ended up being built off the back of "here's why this thing is super bad and you should feel bad for liking it instead of this kino 90s slop instead" videos,
- it is also worth noting that these people had a point and the kid has only been able to sit on the sidelines and watch as his already mediocre serving of relaxation has steadily gotten worse and worse, until it became so unwatchable and preachy that he can no longer enjoy it,
- and just as he's entering his last year of middle school/first year of high school, already the most turbulent and unstable part of any person's adolescent life, the entire country has ground to a halt for several years because some chink accidentally dropped a test tube into a shipment of bootleg Temu toys on the way to America.
- after this "lockdown," all of the above issues have gotten so much worse and affected people so badly that there's a decent chance his girlfriend now thinks she's a boy and his entire friend group has completely turned on him, sold him out, called him a terrible person, and made him unhireable because he decided not to wear a mask after the first few months
Seriously,
zoomers have known nothing but self-hatred and sardonic nihilism their entire lives. Even if this theoretical kid somehow had a pair of very loving parents who stayed together and taught him right, any attempt to make contact with the outside world would have quickly reminded him of the absolute state of things and made sure that the only place he could get some optimism for the future was either from corpo slop trying to sell him Samsung ringtones or from his poor fucking parents who've probably had to mortgage their house just to afford groceries by now. He would almost certainly have spent the most vulnerable and turbulent years of his life trapped inside a few rooms, isolated, watching as his classmates go insane and the world around him burns to ashes because someone got a bad cough.
Even now, arguably the best period these kids could ask for just due to there being
any kind of positive change or pushback against the hell they were born into, it is nightmarish. The dating market has been destroyed by lunatics excommunicating on the first date for not sharing opinions, troons trying to invade every possible space to get their girldicks sucked or their boypussies eaten, and the entire generation growing up socially maladjusted and nervous. The job market has been destroyed by Juan, Rakesh, and Lee flooding applications and costing half an average teen's salary to hire. Every single fucking milestone these poor kids would have been expected to achieve has very likely passed them by due to circumstances out of their control.
When the world becomes a cruel parody of itself, and you have a generation of children who've known nothing better, even the most artificial and shallow attempt at optimism will seem like a life-changing breath of fresh air to them. Even if they don't understand it, which a lot of these "Frutiger Aero enthusiasts" clearly don't given the kind of hilarious titles of their playlists (pictured below), they've never seen anything like it in their lives. It's alien, it's pleasant, and-- most important of all--
it is unconditionally optimistic that things will work out alright.
At least, it is in their eyes.
notice, if you will, how even these titles are sardonic and bitter? Even when desperately trying to cling to something positive, the zoomer cannot help but mourn what he never knew
