Talk to enough Millennials and Zoomers, and before long the conversation will turn to their favorite pop culture brands. Discussing these brands with them at any length will give you the strong impression that younger generations have a deep affinity for projecting themselves into these properties.
Without a doubt, you’ll find members of every generation who indulge in self-insert fantasizing about their favorite franchises. What’s striking about Millennials and Zoomers is that huge numbers of them–perhaps a majority–cannot engage with stories by any other means than self-projection into the narrative.
This phenomenon has become so widespread that many readers may not know that other modes of consuming fiction exist. The reason is as simple as it is unsettling. Drawing audiences in to vicariously live the emotional ups and downs of a story as if experiencing them firsthand is the main mechanism of propaganda. The skilled propagandist creates a hero who serves as an empty vessel into which the audience pours their hopes, fears, and desires. They do not merely identify with the character, they impose their identity on a character-shaped blank slate. When the cardboard cutout wins according the morality the propagandist wants to push, the audience gets a dopamine hit.
Younger audiences’ diminished ability to relate to any other kind of character is a testament to how saturated with propaganda pop culture has become. In fact, it’s been that way for decades. Harry Potter has no discernible personality. He can only be described by his circumstances. Similarly, the main characters from the Star Wars prequels are famously impossible to describe without referring to their jobs or appearance. Fans of the former billion-dollar IP notoriously personalize their attachment to the brand. It should be noted that fans of the latter, even among the counterculture, display a similar penchant for self-insertion. That’s leaving aside Disney’s conscious decision to make the lead role in their Star Wars sequels an utter nonentity. Megacorps have trapped the average Millennial in a fantasy world of cardboard.
It wasn’t always like this. The myths, legends, and epic poems that once formed the bedrock of civilization served to teach younger generations their place in the tribe and the world. The great stories explained a people to themselves and illustrated their duties to throne, altar, and family.
We are descendants of the last survivors of Troy. It is our sacred charge to keep the flame of our ancestors’ traditions alight.
Never mind the Iliad and the Aeneid. Introduce younger readers to the golden age pulps that inspired the mega-brands, and you’ll frequently hear complaints of the characters being too simple, too one-dimensional, not nuanced enough.
A cursory review of the material reveals those complaints as 180 degree inversions of the truth. Solomon Kane contains multitudes, whereas the prequels’ Anakin Skywalker’s entire personality is pouting. The Shadow embodies layers of complexity, a looming air of menace, and a mysterious past to shame Wolverine.
The reason for Millennial audiences’ aversion to heroes of yesteryear is the exact opposite of what they claim. It’s not that classic pulp and pulp-inspired characters are too simple to relate to; it’s that they’re too richly drawn and robust for audiences to refashion as self-inserts.
That’s not to argue that listeners of the Shadow radio show couldn’t imagine themselves donning a slouch hat and ruthlessly pursuing justice with a pair of blazing automatics. What can’t be done is twisting the Shadow away from his definition of justice to serve the audience’s subjective preferences. Not without destroying the character. The recent high-profile attempt to do just that spectacularly crashed and burned.
The moral dimension can’t be overlooked. Vast swaths of contemporary audiences can’t identify with a character who’s out to uphold the good because an objective, universal concept of the good is entirely alien to them.
This is why the cookie cutter blank slate protagonist has become such a fixture of current storytelling. The more fractured and atomized society becomes, the fewer common understandings audiences share. It’s a vicious circle, since earlier propaganda destroyed those shared understandings in the first place.
Beware of critics complaining that golden age characters or their spiritual heirs lack complexity, depth, and nuance. Nine times out of ten, said critic has a long history of attending writers’ workshops taught by oldpub oxygen thieves and zero commercially published works.
But not even the Pop Cult can truly change human nature. For every Millennial irretrievably lost to the swamp of witchery, mystery boxes, and capeshit, another finds a copy of Tarzan of the Apes and finds his way into a larger world.
Affiliate offer: Avoid the perpetual critic’s fate. Let #1 best selling author Adam Lane Smith teach you how to rapidly write, publish what you write, and build a readership. Take his Write Like a Beast course now.
